


Speechless

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-07-27 11:03:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7615531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ed's stupid mark is long, long gone, but it's not like he has time to care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "soulmarks on the wrist/arm that Ed lost" for [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com/), which SUCKER-PUNCHED ME SO BAD, YOU GUYS.
> 
> As usual, I set out to write something quick and punchy and ended up with a 20K crime against fiction and humanity. I'm nearly done, so I will hopefully have, and be posting, the rest of it this weekend… -____-' Bear with me! ~~Or don't, wtf even is this shit~~

Ed is not going to rub his arm.

He’s not.

If he has to sit on his left fucking hand—if he has to _remove it_ —he’s not going to reach over and smudge his thumb at the curving groove that sits where his stupid fucking mark would be if the Gate hadn’t taken it along with the rest.

He’s stronger than that.

And if he doesn’t let himself think too much—if he doesn’t let himself dwell on it, or wonder, or dream—it barely even hurts.

“But that’s not right, is it?” Al is asking—beautiful, handsome, _whole_ Al; Al in the flesh; Al with eyes that only glow metaphorically; Al with a grin full of teeth and two palms split with lines and a heart full of blood, not just benevolence.  “It’s not supposed to have _two_ little… lock-things.  What are those called, anyway?  Why are you laughing at me?”

“Don’t laugh at Al,” Ed says.  He curls the fingers of the automail into the fabric of his slacks and folds his left arm on the table.  There.  “Or I’ll make sure he’s laughing last, and you aren’t gonna like it.”

He doesn’t remember exactly what twists and turns of conversation brought them to this topic, but he sure as hell wishes he could wind it back up—and hurl it in a box, and slam it shut, and hand them a completely different roadmap towards something else entirely.

Too late now.  It usually is.

“They’re commonly called ‘mouths’,” Roy says—to Al, but then he glances over at Ed, and the pit of Ed’s stomach prickles with that little angry tingle he gets half the time Roy deigns to look his way these days.  It’s totally stupid that he and Al see Roy and the team almost more now that they’re free of the whole military muddle than they did before, but Al’s got this thing about _‘loyalty’_ and _‘companionship’_ and _‘well, it’s not like we have any other friends in the city, Brother, and you don’t seem to be willing to move’_.  “Which is, I grant, a bit obscene, but—”

“So show us already,” Breda says, grabbing Al’s glass away and refilling it from the theoretically-communal pitcher of beer.  He shoves it back towards Al, like that’s somehow an equivalent exchange for potentially awkward personal information.  “Jean’s practically an expert on this crap; he can probably help.”

Havoc elbows him—not gently.  Ed himself is practically an expert on elbowing people, so he can tell just by looking.  “It’s important, okay?” Havoc says.  “This is how you find the person you’re supposed to be with forever!  I can’t believe you don’t even care.  It’s like you _want_ to be sad and alone and unfulfilled and miserable for the rest of your life.”

Never mind. That hurts.

Breda doesn’t look like he’s hurting, though: he looks like his birthday just came early.

“You know where Jean’s mark is?” he asks the assembled company—that is, Al, Ed, and Roy.  His bright-eyed delight is so intense it’s kind of alarming.  “Guess.”

Roy puts an elbow on the table, rests his chin on the heel of his hand, and raises one eyebrow very slowly.  “Is it his ass?”

Breda’s face falls immediately.  “You are no fucking fun.”  He pauses, rather deliberately.  “…sir.”

Roy smiles thinly.  “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that, and I’m sure it will not be the last.”

“You’re no fucking fun, Mustang,” Ed says.

To the man’s credit, Roy just gestures towards him, maintaining a completely straight face.  “I rest my case.”

“It makes it hard, though,” Havoc says, eyes hazy and expression wistful.  He startles out of it.  “I mean—difficult.  I mean—you know what I mean.  It’s tough, ’cause most of the time, just to find out, you have to get a girl all the way down to… And, y’know, by then, it’s like—you already like her, and everything, and you can’t quit there just ’cause hers doesn’t match.”

“Which is why,” Breda says, swilling his glass, “it’s ridiculous to spend so much time worrying about this crap when your ‘soulmate’ might live somewhere in rural Xing and not speak a word of Amestrian anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Havoc says dreamily.  “Souls converse in a universal language.  Love finds a way.”

Roy looks like he might be sick, but he’s trying to hide it behind the rim of his pint glass.  “I’m glad Riza isn’t here; she might actually shoot you for that.”

“She’s threatened before,” Havoc says.  “Falman just starts rambling about the whole recorded history of it until I shut up, so it’s probably good he and Fuery went to that radio… thing.  Anyway—Al, where’d your mark show up?”

Al’s been turning his glass around and around really slowly, watching his fingertips slide through the condensation.  Ed can’t tell whether that’s because he’s still really enjoying sensations like cold water on his skin, or because he’s hit that point with the alcohol where physical movements require all of his concentration.  Maybe it’s a bit of both.  The slight flush in his perfect little cheeks isn’t very revealing; it’s a toss-up whether that’s from the beer or the embarrassing fucking attention.

“Um,” Al says, and by the lilt in his voice, there’s definitely some intoxication involved.  Ed swallows down the urge to wince.  It’s so fucking hard to tell when he should step in versus when it’s an overbearing dick move to go all big-brotherly—sometimes Al’s really having fun, but because it’s a situation Ed would _die_ to get out of, he gets all freaked out, and…

And it’s too late now, because Al’s reaching up and tapping his perfect fingers on his perfect shoulder-blade.

Breda and Havoc both stare at him like a pair of predators waiting for the right time to strike.

“Take your shirt off,” Breda says.  “If nothing else, we’ll know if it’s any of the girls in this bar, ’cause they’re _all_ gonna come over here and take a look-see.”

Al gazes thoughtfully into space as he wipes his wet fingers on a napkin and then starts unbuttoning his shirt.  “You know, purely mathematically speaking, the most efficient way to approach this would probably be just going around my daily business without _ever_ wearing a sh—”

Ed lays his hand over both of Al’s, pinning them to Al’s chest to stop him in mid-unbutton.

“Stop prostituting my brother,” Ed says to the table at large, “or there’re gonna be _Consequences_.”

Al slips one hand free, the better to ruffle Ed’s hair like he’s fucking _four_ or some shit.

“Your threats would be more intimidating if you ever followed through,” he says.

Rat bastard little traitor; see if _Ed_ cares if he strips his shirt off and gets mobbed by desperate singles when he’s tipsy and vulnerable in this stupid bar—Ed’ll _let them_ get their filthy, bacteria-crawling hands all over him.  Ed won’t do a goddamn thing.  He’ll just sit here, fold his arms, and glare while Al strips his stupid shirt off and swivels around in his chair so that Havoc and Breda can see the dark red design impressed on his shoulder like an inkless tattoo.

Ed doesn’t have to look.  Ed was the one who found it—there was too much dust and blood and tangled hair everywhere for anyone to recognize it in the first couple of hours, but Ed was helping Al get cleaned up in the hospital, and when he wiped a smear of soapsuds away, it didn’t clear that little shape.

It is an unusual one, as far as he can tell.  He’s deliberately avoided researching this shit, but if memory of having to listen to stupid kids squeal about how romantic it all is for as long as they’ve been unafraid of cooties serves right, the idea is that you’re supposed to have one ‘mouth’ thing and one ‘notch’.  Like a wrench head on one side and a bolt on the other.  And your fucking ‘soulmate’ is supposed to have the opposite pieces, so that it’d fit both ways.

Al’s is different, though.  Al’s is more like a square—like a block—with two mouths joined at the back, facing outward, and a notch on either side.  Which is confusing as fucking _hell_ , actually, according to the stupid ‘rules’ of this bullshit game, because doesn’t that mean there are two people out there who have marks in exactly that spot on their shoulders, and both will fit with his?

Does that mean Al can’t be happy without them _both_?  Does that mean this stupid fucking task just got twice as hard, because they have to turn up _two_ fucking soulmates before Al’ll be able to—

And what if those two people have already found each other, and they’re happy enough without him?

It just sort of figures, is all.  It just sort of figures that Al’s so fucking perfect he’d fulfill _two_ people’s wildest dreams, and meanwhile…

Whatever.

Roy doesn’t move to look either—not that Ed’s paying attention, or anything; it’s just that he’s watching Breda and Havoc lean in, and he happens to notice out of the corner of his eye that Roy’s not following suit.

“That’s a cute spot for it,” Havoc says.  “I mean—not _cute_ -cute, but—cute on a girl.  Plus you’d be able to see if if she wore a nice little summer dress, y’know?”

Ed has no idea what a ‘nice little summer dress’ is or looks like.

“It does have two mouths,” Breda says in no small amount of awe.  “That’s _got_ to mean you’re supposed to shack up with two chicks at the same time, you lucky little _shit_.”

“Watch your language,” Roy says before Al can even finish turning around indignantly—admittedly, he’s moving slower than usual, presumably because of all the stupid beer.  He’s still extra-susceptible to that shit.  “Besides which, how do you know Alphonse is attracted to women at all, let alone exclusively?”

Havoc and Breda stare at Roy like he’s speaking total gibberish, and Al starts snickering and then does this weirdly adorable snort-thing, and Ed—

Ed’s heart fucking _drops_ and just keeps falling.

“Statistics?” Breda says, at the same time Havoc volunteers, “Well, he didn’t _argue_.”

“I mean,” Al says, beaming, “I have been talking about girls for years, but—you’re right, Colonel.  There’s no reason to assume.  And there’d be nothing wrong with it if I was interested in men instead.”

And then—like a fucking train wreck in slow motion, which Ed can’t reach or touch or _stop_ —Al turns towards Ed, smiles wider, and winks.

Because he knows.  Of course he fucking knows.

And now everyone else at this fucking table knows, too.

And Ed’s just going to have to get on a train that isn’t wrecked, head out to the western border, and hurl himself off of the highest mountain in the Spine.

There have been a lot of fucking excruciating silences in Ed’s life, so the fact that this one charts is pretty noteworthy to begin with.  The fact that it might make the top fucking five is better yet.

And then it gets fucking _worse_ , because Roy fucking Mustang looks Ed right in the fucking _eyes_ and says—

“You are absolutely right, Alphonse.”

Apparently Al’s swanned right on into the happy-go-lucky stage of being drunk; without putting his stupid fucking shirt back on—people are looking at him, with _Intentions_ , and it’s making Ed’s skin crawl—he plants both elbows on the tabletop, rests his face in both of his hands, and smiles sunnily across the table.

“Where’s your mark, Second Lieutenant Breda?” he asks.  “I think everyone else has shared.”

Breda raises his eyebrows.  “Like hell they have.”  He jerks his head towards Ed and Roy, in that order.  “If they ’fess up, I will—how’s that?”

Al blinks, face all bright and open and hopeful, and then… remembers, by the look of it, because he hesitates.

“Well, fuckin’ gee,” Ed says.  He hefts his right arm up onto the table, makes sure it _clunk_ s loud and solid against the wood, and sweeps his left hand downward along the whole thing to indicate it.  “I’d sure like to show you all my fuckin’ secrets, but I can’t.”

Havoc and Breda cringe so hard and so genuinely that he almost regrets it, because it looks like they really do care.

“Well, shit,” Breda says.  “Um—sorry.”

“That blows, Boss,” Havoc says.  “And not in the good way.  Not in—you know what I mean.”

The upshot of having the fucking automail accessible is that when Ed smacks it to his forehead, it sort of cools the hot, stupid blush rising all over his fucking face.

“I suppose that leaves me, then,” Roy says, garnering everyone’s attention again.  “Doesn’t it?”

Ed’s been noticing—not on _purpose_ —how little things about Roy change after he’s been drinking for a while.  He sits differently.  His hands start to fidget sometimes.  He smiles more, with progressively less of the wise-ass fucking smirk in it as the night goes on.  The quality of his voice, too—it settles into a slightly lower register, and there isn’t an edge on every fucking syllable.  His eyes soften, subtly, until they’re less like steel vault doors and more like wrought iron gates, and occasionally something slips through.  The set of his shoulders relaxes a little—although maybe that’s just an optical illusion, because Ed’s not used to seeing him without the stuffy-ass uniform jacket.

It’s just—weird.  It’s not like anyone with a brain and a pair of eyes won’t have noticed that he’s constantly switching out different masks in front of other officers to try to keep them all guessing; and it’s not like Ed hasn’t gotten plenty of glimpses of the fucking weirdo-nerd when there was no one watching, and all of the overlapping layers fell away.  But it’s still unsettling to see him unguarded.

It’s unsettling to be trusted with the truth.

It’s not like Ed can’t keep a fucking secret, obviously, but it’s a little bit different to stop yourself from telling everybody and their uncle _Hey, so, Mustang’s kinks are bloodless coups and democracy_ than it is to carry the weight of who he really is around with you all the time.

It’s just weird.  Is all.  It’s weird how people don’t change, but your perceptions of them do.  It’s weird how the chasms inside people are so much deeper than you ever dare to think.

Roy’s folding the cuff of his right sleeve back, and that’s bizarrely sort of… angry-tingly.  He’s got such showy fucking hands—the right one’s the worst; you can still see just the faintest impression of the flame array on the back, and right through the middle there’s this vicious snarl of scar tissue where the saber wound is still knitting up.  Absolutely fucking over-the-top.  Ed heard through the hospital grapevine that those stab wounds got infected, but he’s pretty sure Roy made it up to try to get sympathy from hot nurses or some shit.

He’s so busy being angry about Roy’s hands that he doesn’t think about the implications until Roy turns his obnoxiously nicely-shaped forearm over, and Al’s breath catches.

Roy’s mark is weird for two reasons—for one thing, it isn’t a dark sort of blood-like crimson color, like everybody else’s; it’s _white_ , like just another scar.

The second problem is that it’s smack-dab in the center of his right fucking wrist.

“Whoa,” Breda says, and he and Havoc are both leaning in again, so fast and so precariously that Ed can’t believe none of the drinks get knocked over.  “What the hell is up with that color?”

Roy shrugs.  “It was red like everyone else’s for a long time.  Eight or nine years ago, I woke up one morning, and it looked like this.”

Everyone stares at it, and Ed manages not to shift in his seat.  His heart is so fucking loud; what the fuck?  It can’t possibly—it can’t _mean_ anything; it’s just a statistical anomaly.  That’s the only explanation.

“From what I’ve read,” Havoc says, tearing little strips off of the corner of his cocktail napkin without even looking at it, “there’s only a couple’f situations where it changes color, and one of ’em is if your soulmate—if they—y’know—”

“If your person dies,” Roy says, too calmly, “it turns black.  This has to be something else.  There’s really nothing in the literature about it.  I’ve come across a few mentions of marks turning purple, but I think that’s an indicator of distance—speaking to your point about soulmates in other countries, Heymans.”

Breda nods, although it’s hard to tell if he’s really listening given how hard he’s staring at Roy’s mark.  “You ever take this to one of those so-called specialists or something?”

“My mother part-timed as a matchmaker,” Roy says, since apparently he’s not done shaking the entire fucking world around on its axis tonight.  “She’s always been extremely good at finding people, and there’s a lot of money in it.”  He rolls his shoulders fluidly into another shrug, and Ed wisely decides that glaring at the scratches on the tabletop is less likely to make his stomach roil with tingle-rage.  “She’d never heard of anything like this, either.”

Past his furious scrutiny of the table, Ed can just see Breda elbowing Havoc, giving back as good as he got earlier.  “You ever been to one of those?  Why don’t you put out one of the classified ads, if you’re so desperate to find your girl?”

“Are you kidding?” Havoc asks, sounding significantly more scandalized than this stupid situation really merits.  “You think they wouldn’t ban me from going out in public if I sent in a picture of my _ass_?”

Breda’s trying not to laugh, but you can hear it creeping into his voice.  “Well—just—frame the damn picture carefully.  It’s where your mark _is_ ; it’s not like you’re trying to be indecent or something.  You can’t be the only person who’s got one in a funny spot.”

“It’s not funny!” Havoc says.

“Couldn’t you sketch it for them?” Al asks.  He’s still not wearing his fucking shirt.  Ed picks it up from where it crumpled over the back of his chair and drapes it over his shoulders so that he’s a _little_ less half-fucking-naked in a goddamn bar.  “You could send the drawing in with a description.”

“I don’t know,” Havoc says, chewing on his lip.  “I mean… there’s so little magic left in the world as it is, you know?  So little mystery.  Last thing I wanna do is suck it out of _love_.”

There’s a long pause.

Then Breda loses his shit laughing.

Ed starts shoving Al’s arms back into his shirt sleeves.

“Time to go,” he says.

Al is watching in wonder as Breda’s eyes start tearing up, and an indignantly-squawking Havoc goes six shades of red in succession.

“I think you’re right,” Al says.

  


* * *

  


Ed’s so busy trying to fight Al’s shirt back on him—and struggling with the _stupid_ fucking _buttons_ , which are small and slippery and extremely stupid; and he’s had one too many fucking beers for this—that he doesn’t even notice that Roy came outside with them until the bastard’s hailing them a taxi.

“Fucker,” he says—in general, for once, rather than specifically as a synonym for Roy.  “How much do I owe you?”  He manages to extract his hands from button hell in order to start searching in his pockets.  “I think we had… what, seven or eight between the two of us?  And they’re a couple-hundred cens each?  So—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Roy says.  “My treat.”

“Fuck that,” Ed says.  “I don’t wanna owe you.”

…that came out wrong.

“Money,” he says.  “I don’t wanna owe you money.  _More_ money.  You know.”

A cab pulls up, and the way Roy’s blinking at him is weird and tingle-annoying, so Ed turns around and opens the back door of the car and bundles Al into the backseat.  Al giggles.  His shirt’s still half-undone, and it’s flapping everywhere and shit.

“I’ll start a tab for you,” Roy says.  “How’s that?  You can pay it in full next time.”

Ed stands up as straight as he can and folds his arms.  It’s a stronger position to glower from.

“All right,” he says.  “I _guess_.”

That sounded way more cutting and incisive in his head.

He’s decided he fucking hates beer.  And pretty much everything else to do with bars and liquor, including the way he isn’t clever or aware enough to dodge out of the way before Roy reaches out and puts a too-warm hand on his left shoulder.

 _That_ hand, no less.  That hand, on that arm, which includes that wrist.

“I hope you weren’t offended,” Roy says.  “They don’t know any better—not that that makes it acceptable, but it’s from a place of ignorance, not cruelty.  And I meant what I said.”  He squeezes gently.  “There’s nothing wrong.”

That’s some bullshit if Ed’s ever heard it—and he’s heard a lot—but it’d be fucking rude to say that, because Roy’s trying to make a nice generalization in reference to the whole not-into-girls thing, and throwing it back in his face would be shitty as hell.

“Okay,” Ed says.  “It doesn’t matter.  They were just saying stuff.”

He wants to say _It didn’t bother me_ , but somehow it’s gotten really hard to lie to that bastard these days.

“They were,” Roy says.  His hand lifts off Ed’s shoulder, and his knuckles—

Brush—

Ed’s jaw, and his cheek—

And then Roy drops his arm.

“Take care,” he says.  “Goodnight.”

“Yeah,” Ed says—on fucking autopilot, because he’s pretty sure his brain just fritzed out and failed completely.  “You, too.”

He makes his bewildered body turn around and climb into the backseat of the cab, and Roy shuts the door behind him, and then Al is clambering over his lap to get onto his softer side in order to curl up with his left arm.

“Where to?” the cabbie says, and Ed tells him, and he _doesn’t_ look out the window to watch Roy standing on the curb with both hands in his pockets, watching as they drive away.  He doesn’t.  At all.  He just assumes it happened.  Clearly.

He gets a grand total of about thirty seconds of peace and quiet before Al snuggles up to his shoulder and says, “What if it’s because of the Gate?”

Ed’s heart bangs in his throat.  Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ Al’s drunk enough that he’ll forget this by tomorrow.

Maybe not.

“It’s just a coincidence,” he says.

“It’s the same spot, Brother,” Al says, and by the slurred-sleepy tone to his voice, luck might be on Ed’s fucking side for once in his life.

“Probably lots of people have it there,” Ed says.  “It’s just a freak probability thing.  It’s bound to happen eventually.  There’s a lot of people in the world.”

“That’s true,” Al says.  He sounds so content that Ed kind of wants to pet his hair, but the automail would probably snag and get stuck.  “Wouldn’t it be nice, though?  If it was him.”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “Never thought about it.”

Lying to Al’s not easy, either, but sometimes it has to be done.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I have bumped up the rating on this bad boy, because there's probably gonna be some naughty shit at the end. :'D
> 
> Also, since I sort of… failed to specify, it's an AU. Where things are how I like them. XD SORRY, I DO THAT SO OFTEN I FORGET TO MENTION IT. >____>''

The call comes just after five in the morning.

Ed knows because the decrepit little clock that Al fell in love with at some antique shop is sitting right next to the phone, and the position of its hands is unmistakable even though his head’s banging so fucking hard he can barely hear his own voice grinding out “Hello?”

“Is this Edward or Alphonse?” a desperate feminine voice says in response.  “This is Doctor Heilis—we really—we need one of you to come in, if you can; I’m so sorry—”

“S’fine,” he manages.  “This is Ed.  And it’s fine.  What’s—”

“Just a few minutes ago—there was a house fire—there are two children, a brother and a sister; they—”

“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Ed says.  “Tell ’em at the front where they need to send us.”

“Thank y—”

He hangs up and throws his brown coat on over his fucking pajamas, kicking around in the half-light of the foyer for his shoes.

“ _Al_!” he calls down the hall.  “We’re going to the hospital!  Come on!”

He hears a very faint, very sad moan of “My _head_ …”

“I know!” he says.  “I’m sorry!  It’s _kids_ , Al!  C’mon!”

There’s a great commotion, a serious _thunk_ , a whimper, and then a smaller commotion as Al stumbles down the hall to join him.  Ed’s got Al’s best coat ready for him.  Al’s wearing the pajamas with the pattern of the kitty faces.  Ed really, really hopes there isn’t too much blood this time.

He shoves his feet into his shoes and holds the door while Al hops into his.

“You okay?” he asks.

Al tries to twist his grimace into a smile.  “Eh.  Close enough.”

It’s a good damn thing they live nearby, and it’s a good damn thing it’s so early—not that Ed would give a flying fuck if anybody saw them running down the street in their jammies, but Al has this thing about ‘shame’ and ‘proper conduct’ or something, and he’s always talking about how glad he is that he couldn’t feel embarrassment viscerally back when Ed was flailing around and making them look like a pair of dorks all the time.  Ed believes the record would show that he usually made them look like a pair of badasses.  There were some dork moments, sure, but the bulk of the experiences are on his side.

Point is—

Adrenaline and the shoes they jammed on sockless (Ed’s right heel’s chafing like a motherfucker, and it’s _weird_ , having that ancillary sensation of mild pain in the muddle of everything else) carry them to Central City Hospital in half the time that Ed projected.  They’re both panting so hard he can’t tell if they’re shaking or just breathless by the time they stagger into the emergency room entrance—it’s the closest, and he’s pretty sure it’s Dr. Heilis’s usual beat, and it’s the most likely place someone would bring disaster victims.  Before he’s stopped wheezing, Ed starts gesturing to the receptionist in a way that’s supposed to mean _Where are the kids?_

“Are you the Elrics?” she asks.  Must be new here; usually people see them coming and basically just dive out of the way.  “Operating rooms three and five, just down th—”

Definitely new: Al’s got Ed’s sleeve and is hauling him at a renewed breakneck speed down the corridor, then around the sharp left turn that has toppled at least one gurney in the time Ed’s been here.

“You take three,” Al says, and the soles of his shoes squeal on the linoleum, and _fuck_ , it is so good to hear him gasping for breath with his real-life fucking lungs and his real-life fucking throat, and— “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Al—”

They skid to a stop in front of the door marked _OPERATING ROOM 3 NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRANCE_ , and Al’s bright-wild eyes fix on his.  Kid’s hair is fucking _everywhere_.

“It’s burns,” Ed says.  “That’s all she said.  Just—heads up.”

“Thanks,” Al says.  He musters a slight smile.  “Good luck, Brother.”

“You, too, Al,” Ed says.

Then he shoulders his way through the door.

The stench of charred flesh and scorched hair slams into him with so much acrid, eye-stinging force that his stomach turns _hard_ , and for a second he thinks that the hangover’s going to tip him right over the fucking edge—

He reaches out more or less blindly and grips the cold steel bar on the shelving unit next to the door with his left hand.  It’s fucking cold in here. That helps to ground him.

He draws in a slow deep breath, holds it for a second until the roiling revolt in his guts settles to a minor burbling sort of motion, and steps forward, pushing up his sleeves.

“Fill me in,” he says to the attendants bent over the operating table.

“There isn’t much to tell,” one of the nurses says.  “We just got her in here a few minutes ago.”  She peels back the coverings.  “See for yourself.”

He can.

It’s fucking horrible.

Children in pain is bad enough; children in _unnecessary_ pain—children suffering so much he can barely even _imagine_ —

At least she’s not conscious.  At least she’s hopefully been out for all of the worst of it; at least she can’t feel it right now.

“Can somebody help disinfect me?” he says, holding out his hands.  He’s going to need both of them.  He’s going to need two hands, and all the bits and pieces he and Al have cobbled together from medical alchemy and mailed-in alkahestry books and sheer ingenuity over the past two years.

“Got it,” a male nurse says, sidling around the table, and Ed backs up towards the sink so they can scrub the worst of the germs off of him together, and then—

All that’s left—

Is alchemy.  All that’s left is the last-chance, the last-ditch—the Elric Method.

Today that means trying to stretch and shift and rework and remake as much of the angry, bloodily-burned, raw-blistered and soot-blackened nightmare of this little girl’s back as he’s capable of.  The way the scalded flesh gleams wetly in the bright blue light as he presses his palms together and then lays them down—

He swallows, and swallows, and holds himself together—because she _needs_ him.  She needs his help.  This is the least he can do; this is the smallest thing that he can offer.

He focuses in so fucking intensely that he can barely smell it, barely taste it in the air, barely see anything but the light and his mismatched fingertips and the fragile little sparrow-strength bones underneath her shredded skin.

He’s going to fix this.

He _is_.

  


* * *

  


There’s only so much he can do with alchemy when he can’t make _more_ of her, but hopefully—he’s hoping, all right; he’s hoping with everything he’s fucking got—it’s going to be enough.

He reduced the severity of all of the worst burns on her by a significant margin, and he redistributed thicker sections of the surrounding epidermis to help coax them into healing up completely.  She’s going to have a rough couple of weeks, but he’s pretty sure she’ll make it.  He’s pretty sure everything’s sealed up enough to rule out an infection.  He’s pretty sure that with enough time, she’ll be okay.

The second he steps away from the operation table, his right knee starts to shake so hard that the guy who helped him clean his hands off instinctively slips an arm under his shoulders to try to hold him upright.

He tries to shake it off and direct his stumble towards the door—which is probably stupid, but that’s always sort of been his signature, right?

“I’m fine,” he says.  “Hey—thanks, but I really—I’m good.  Just need some coffee.  That’s all.  Are you guys—you got it from—”

Cynthia, who he knows, and who he swears has got to be distantly related to Rosé, smiles and salutes him.  “Andreas, get the man a coffee, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Andreas says.  He holds the door, which would normally not be cause for a surge of secret gratitude, but Ed’s flagging so fucking fast right now that his vision’s swimming at the edges.  “Cafeteria coffee okay?”

“Sounds great,” Ed says, which is half-true only because anything that remotely resembles caffeine would be a godsend.  His head is buzzing.  Either there’s a wasp nest in his skull, or he’s close to crashing out.  “Sounds… f—” Censor.  “Freakin’ amazing, actually.  Thanks.”

“No problem,” Andreas says.  His smile has way too many watts for someone who just helped press flaps of singed skin down against a little girl’s spine so that Ed could try to trick them into healing there.  “Back in a jiffy.”

Scientifically speaking, Ed doesn’t know exactly how long a ‘jiffy’ is supposed to be, but it’s probably long enough to sink down into one of the crappy metal chairs scattered along the hall outside the ORs and stare at the ceiling, trying to remember how to breathe deep and slow enough to float his brain on oxygen again.  He knows he’s in some serious shit here; yesterday he wouldn’t have been able to imagine a universe where he’d call the sludge they sell in the cafeteria ‘amazing’.  They’ve committed people for less.

“Hey, Brother,” the best voice in the world says after some interval of time that he hasn’t really tracked.  Maybe a quarter-jiffy?  Fuck knows.  Ed looks up towards Al instantly regardless, and his perfect-wonderful angel-brother is holding out a bagel on a napkin and a paper cup full of water.  “Before you ask, I just had one.”

“I love you,” Ed says, taking them.  He chugs the contents of the cup.  Hard to tell at this point whether it makes the swoopy feeling in his skull better or worse, but he considers the bagel next.  “Where’d this come from?”

“Break room,” Al says.  “It’s not even technically stealing if there’s no clear indication that you shouldn’t take one, right?”

“I love you even more,” Ed says.  He bites into it.  Shit’s _fresh_ and everything.  He’s not about to wait until he’s swallowed to ask the important question, though: “How’ff’it go?”

“It was fine,” Al says, dropping into the seat beside him with a faint sigh.  “They said she was hurt worse than he was, so I think you got the tougher case.  He’s a little younger.”  Neither of them says _She was probably trying to protect him_.  Neither of them has to.  “He woke up long enough for us to tell him what was going on.  I caught Cynthia on my way over; she said they’re going to put them in different rooms for a little while until a bigger one clears up.  She said the little girl should hopefully be awake in a couple of hours; I guess they hit her with something pretty good.”

Ed tries to smile while inhaling the bagel—which is a bit of a challenge, but his favorite kind.  “Can I have some of whatever the fuck that was?”

“Sure,” Al says.  “I’ll steal you some of that, too, and then we can get caught, and then they’ll fire us, and they’ll besmirch our names in every newspaper in the country for thieving sedatives from children, and then no one will ever pay us money to do alchemy ever again.”

Ed swallows a bite of bagel and turns to look at him.  “That escalated pretty fuckin’ fast.”

“Yeah,” Al says, gazing ruefully at the wall.  “Speaking of drugs I want to steal, my head is killing me.” He glances down at his kitty pajamas. Nothing splattered that Ed can see, but Ed’s been accused once or twice of being selectively blind and/or deaf and/or pigheadedly illogical.  “I think I’m going to go home and go back to sleep.”

“Good,” Ed says, switching the empty cup to his right hand so he can reach over and ruffle Al’s hair with the left.  It’s all stuck up funny from sleeping, so the ruffling might actually help.  “I think I’m gonna stay until the kid wakes up—just to make sure she knows what’s going on and… make sure everything took and whatever.  Y’know.  I remembered last night that I left some reading I wanted to do in the Closet anyway.”

Ed calls it the Closet.  Al calls it the Nook.  The hospital calls it their ‘office’, which is pretty generous, considering it fits a single desk and a single bookshelf with about two square feet of space left.  It’s got a hook to hang up two off-white coats with _Resident Medical Alchemist_ embroidered on the chest, though, and they’ve got their own phone, and it’s in such a distantly forgotten corner of the south wing of the building that it stays quiet even when this place is bustling so much it’s a blur.  There aren’t any windows, either, which Al lamented right up until he realized that that feature made it perfect for sneaking naps.

“Sounds good,” Al says.  “Keep me posted.  And just call me if anything comes up.”

“Will do,” Ed says, patting his pockets.  “You got your keys?”

Al fishes his out of his pocket, and the giant pink cat-face he hung on them jingles its little chain merrily.

“Good,” Ed says, “’cause I fucking forgot mine.”

“Oh, no,” Al says.  “I think we left the door unlocked.  Erudite early-rising burglars will surely have broken in and stolen all of our arcane alchemy texts.”

“Probably,” Ed says.  He nudges Al’s arm with his elbow, and it _gives_.  That is never gonna get old.  “You should hurry back.”

“Guess so,” Al says.  He tips his head against Ed’s for a second and then levers himself up.  “Don’t work too hard, okay?”

“When have I ever done that?” Ed asks.

Al gives him a Look.

“…recently,” Ed says.  “When there wasn’t a cause for it.  You know what?  Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Al says.

“Shut up anyway,” Ed says.

Al smiles.  He looks so damn tired; the circles under his eyes are so deep.  Ed’s got to… something.  He’s got to do something.  He’s got to figure something out.  Al loves this, yeah—this whole gig; the medical thing; the doctor thing; saving lives and helping people—but it’s draining him, too.

It’s draining both of them, really.  But Ed’s used to that.  That’s his style.  That’s his _life_.

“See you later,” Al says.  “Take care of yourself, too, would you?”

“Yup,” Ed says.

“Real convincing,” Al says.  “If you’re not home by dinner, I’m sending a search party, okay?”

“Love you, too,” Ed says.

Al blows him a kiss and then puts his stride advantage to good use skedaddling down the hall before Ed can throw the cup at him.

Little shit.

Ed wouldn’t trade him for the whole damn world.

  


* * *

  


He startles awake at a slight pressure on his left arm, but before he can get the right fist involved and turn the source of that pressure into some automail-knuckle-imprinted mincemeat—

His eyes mostly focus, and he registers that it’s Andreas.

There’s still a little bit of swimminess at the corners, though.  Either Ed’s _way_ more hungover than he has any right to be, or Al’s on to something, and he’s about to start needing glasses.

No time for that right now, though, because—

“Coffee!” Ed says, not even trying to tamp down the fucking _delight_.  “All right, you’re my new favorite.  Don’t tell the others.”

Andreas flashes him a huge grin, passes him the cup, and sits down next to him.

“My lips are sealed,” he says.  “Sorry it took so long; there was a hell of a line.  Breakfast and all.”

“Oh, shit,” Ed says.  He fits the coffee cup inside his empty water cup to free a hand for digging into his pockets.  “How much do I owe you?”

Andreas waves both hands, still grinning.  He’s going to strain his face in another second.  “On me.  It was an honor just watching you work.”

Ed can feel that his smile is supremely awkward, which has a lot to do with how close Andreas is to his right arm, but he’s pretty much powerless to change either one.  “I barely even did anything.”

“You were incredible,” Andreas says.  He looks really fucking serious about this.  Ed tries to make leaning away a little bit look natural—partly because holy shit, _personal space_ ; but mostly so that he can sip his coffee without hitting Andreas in the face with the bottom of the cup.  “I’ve never seen alchemy up close before, and to use it for _medicine_ —to heal someone like that—” He smiles.  Kind of… dreamily.  Like he’s drifting off towards fantasy-land right this second, and if Ed doesn’t put a leash on him and drag him back like a kite or some shit, he’ll disappear into the clouds.  “It puts the magic back into it, you know?”

A couple years ago, Ed would’ve looked him right in the eyes and said _It’s not magic; it’s fucking science_.

Today, though, he swallows that, and he says “Just… doing the best I can” instead.

“It’s great,” Andreas says.  He’s… still smiling.  “You’re—I mean, _you’re_ pretty great.”

Ed blinks.  Even after the not-bashing-with-coffee-cup distance he added in, it suddenly seems like they’re way too fucking close together.

“Um,” he says.  “Thanks.”

Oh, shit.  Shit- _fuck_.  Andreas’s eyes just went all big, and his cheeks just went pinkish.

“Can I get you a coffee?” he asks.  He gestures, vaguely and helplessly, and Ed’s heart wrings itself empathetically a little bit.  “Not—I mean, I know you _have_ —I mean—another time, maybe?  Somewhere else.”

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ —

It’s not like—

It’s not like there’s anything _wrong_ with this guy.

It’s not like he’s not… nice, and… well, his face is sort of… face-y.  It’s put together pretty well.  He has cool dark brown eyes and really thick black eyelashes and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.  And Ed’s really only known him for a couple of hours now, but he can usually tell in five minutes flat whether someone’s decent underneath or not, and Andreas has a ring of it about him.  Most of the people who work at the hospital do.

It’s just that something in Ed’s head is saying _Don’t chance it_ —something that lodged in that spot in the back of his skull after festering a long time in the center of his chest; something that wriggled to life in the base of his guts and traveled upward on the wings of pure fucking instinct.

Al’s always telling him he shouldn’t close doors in his own face just because he’s not sure what’s behind them, but this…

Something in him’s saying no.

“Uh,” he chokes out around the miasma of panicked half-thoughts— _Don’t hurt his feelings!  Don’t say ‘fuck’!  You’re probably going to have to work with him on Monday, with your luck!  Why does this shit always happen when you’re tongue-tied-stupid, and your head aches?  Just your fuckin’ luck, Elric; just what you deserve.  Just be nice, for fuck’s sake; just fucking_ say _something; just—_ “I’m kinda—it’s been a really busy—month or so; maybe… another time?”

Fucking motherfucking _fuck_.

Andreas’s face is doing that thing—where every part of it goes just a little too neutral and a little bit cold as he tries to close off his feelings before the disappointment shows through.

Ed’s familiar with that by now.  He’s disappointed a lot of fucking people over the years.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt every time.

“Hey,” he gets himself to say.  He’s grasping at straws and flailing underwater here, but doesn’t it count for something if you try?  “If you want to—y’know, like, get lunch sometime—next time we’re both on the same shift—”

“That’d be nice,” Andreas says.  “My schedule’s still pretty up in the air, but…”

“I’ll keep an eye out for you,” Ed says.  He raises the coffee cup.  “On me, since you got this.  How’s that?”

“Sounds great,” Andreas says, but his smile doesn’t light his eyes the same way as it did three minutes ago, and Ed feels like _shit_.  “I should probably get back to work, but—see you around.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  So much for the flailing.  He went down like a fucking boulder to the bottom of the lake.  “See you.”

Andreas gets up and saunters off, rejoining the intermittent flow of people in scrubs and white coats moving up and down the hallway, and Ed…

Takes a couple seconds to try to talk himself down from the instinct to berate himself for that whole conversation.  He didn’t do anything wrong—did he?  He’s within his rights not to _want_ to go out with some guy; accepting a free fucking coffee isn’t the same thing as signing a contract. He’s not responsible for Andreas’s feelings.  And he tried.  He tried not to hurt them; he tried not to make it worse. All he did was _not_ defer to what somebody else wanted.  That’s not a fucking crime—so why the hell does he have to sit here feeling like he just fucking ruined something?

Well—what he said to Al before was true, and besides that, he doesn’t want to be sitting here like a bump on a fucking log if Andreas happens by again.

He rocks his weight back and tries to slingshot himself up out of the chair.  The instant he shifts his weight up onto his legs, he realizes his mistake.

First off, his right fucking foot’s asleep.

Second, the air pressure’s changed, and his leg port aches like a mother _fucker_.

This is just fine and fucking dandy; apparently the universe decided to deal out immediate retribution for him wounding Andreas’s feelings.  He considers pitching the coffee cup in a trashcan on his way out, so that at least he’s not really taking advantage of the generosity of the gesture anymore, but one of his deepest—perhaps his only—moral beliefs is that wasting coffee is a crime.  Even mediocre cafeteria coffee is a precious natural resource, and should be considered moderately sacrosanct accordingly.

So he limps towards the doors back out of the ER, and he chugs it.  Even though it has some sort of dairy product in it, and all the sugar’s sunk to form a layer of crunchy slush down at the bottom.

It still tastes pretty good, which says a lot about how bad he fucking needs it.

Because the universe hates him and wants him to give up—and always has, and knows he won’t, and hates him even more for that—this stupid hospital expanded in an organic kind of way, so the east and west wings both connect to the north one with convenient little covered walkways, but the south wing is off on its own like a cast-out stepchild or some shit, and the only way to reach it is down a stretch of concrete past where the ambulances drop off for the ER.

The lot’s pretty empty, and the path is, too, but there’s a girl sitting on the curb right outside the entrance, with her feet in the gutter and her head in one hand.  The other hand’s holding a lit cigarette trailing a tiny stream of smoke, and she’s wearing a paramedic uniform.

The darkening sky’s gone a delightful shade of pigeon-feather gray on the undersides of the cloud cover.  The throbbing in the ports makes Ed want to fucking run for the Closet, where he’s got a hot water bottle stashed in one of the drawers of their desk, and Al’s installed a tea kettle because it’s ‘civilized’; but the glimpse he gets of the girl’s face makes him sit his miserable ass down next to her instead.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says automatically.  “Thanks.”  She glances at him, and her eyes flick up and down over his admittedly probably kind of hilarious fucking outfit.  “Are you one of those Elric guys?”

Word travels fast around here.  Or at least when it travels, it sticks.

“Yeah,” he says.  He holds his left hand out.  “Ed.”

She pauses, and he holds up the right so she can see why he’s offering the other one.

“Oh,” she says.  She grasps his hand—brief, brisk, and firm; good shake—and tips her chin at the automail.  “It’s really nice work, though.  I had a girlfriend who did that stuff once.”

He smiles a little.  “Yeah, this is my best friend’s masterpiece, pretty much.  It’s seen me through some shit.”

She smiles back.  “It’s funny, the way they talk about you and your brother.  My driver was going on about you when we were coming back from that fucking house—the whole way, they were just, like, ‘It’s all right, they can call in the Elrics; the Elrics can fix anything.’  I think they should apply to be the head of your fucking fanclub at this point.  But—I mean, you did, kind of.  Fix it, I mean.”

He shrugs.  Which hurts.  Fucking hell.  “There’s only so much you can do, is the thing.  And anybody could do it; it’s not like we’re doing anything special—it’s just alchemy.  But alchemy’s got limits, and they’re really just based on what you start with.  You can’t make shit out of thin air.  Sometimes you can fix things with what you’ve got, and sometimes you can’t.”

She takes a long drag on her cigarette and blows the smoke out slow.  “Yeah.  Sometimes you can’t.”  Her face scrunches up as she stares out across the lot.  “Sometimes you can’t do shit.  Like when there’s fucking kids in a burning house, and nobody even _reported_ —”  She turns to him, and the agony on her face is so intense that something in him freezes up.  “It was a neighbor halfway down the fucking street that called.  Way down the road; it’s that new fucking development right past Calverson Avenue.  They were outside, that family—they wanted to help, but the firefighters wouldn’t let them, obviously.  Nobody else on the whole damn street even… even came outside.  Like they didn’t even _care_.  You know how loud a house on fire is?”

Ed’s heart beats in his throat so hard it almost chokes the “Yes” right out of existence.

But she hears it.  And she might hear some tiny part of what’s behind it.

“God,” she says.  The cigarette comes up, hovers, drops.  The smoke slithers out through her parted lips.  “Fuck that.  Fuck people.  Fuck today.”

“Wish we could drink to that,” Ed says.  He draws a breath, holds it until the darker, thicker, blacker smoke lingering at the back of his head clears a little, and lets it out.  “She’s gonna be okay.  The girl.  And her brother, too.”

The paramedic knuckles at her eyes and gives him a weak smile.  “That’s something.  Guess you guys are as good as they say, huh?”

“Probably not,” Ed says.  “People say all kinds of shit.  But we’re trying.”

“That counts,” she says.  “They listen to you in there?”

“The staff, you mean?” he asks.  She nods.  “Mostly, I guess.  Why?”

“Nobody’d tell me whether they’d contacted next of kin,” she says.  She takes an even longer drag off the cigarette this time and then releases it in a curling little cloud.  “It… the one set of neighbors that were there—they were saying this family’d just moved in, and they were so far from home, or something.  It was kind of hard to tell with the hysterics, and we were all on edge waiting to see if the firefighters were even going to _get_ anybody out, but—I mean, I dunno if they have anybody.  The kids.  I dunno if they have anybody at all.”

Two scarred kids who have to go it just about alone—how come that sounds familiar?  Ed’s heart aches so sharp and hard and suddenly that it strangles his breath for a second.

“I’ll figure it out,” he says.  “I can promise you that.”

“That’s more than I had a minute ago,” she says.  She holds the cigarette out towards him.  Ash flakes off the end, and embers spiral towards the pavement.  “You want—?”

“Nah,” he says.  “Thanks, though.”  Al would fucking murder him if he even thought about it semi-seriously.  Al would _know_.  “Hey,” he says, levering himself up to his feet and regretting that more than a little as the spears of pain stab up at him from the leg port in particular.  “See you around?”

“Sure,” she says.  “Good to meet you.”

“Likewise,” he says, and then he has to save his energy for stumping away towards the south wing.

On that note, fuck this hospital’s architect with something _really_ uncomfortable.

  


* * *

  


Good old fucking Asclepius.  Nobody understands how to write so tantalizingly cryptically that Ed simultaneously wants to soak it all in and tear his fucking hair out quite like this guy.

The book’s easy to find, as is usually the case in any space an Elric inhabits that hasn’t yet gotten completely blanketed in paper products.  Their apartment’s starting to edge into a dangerous proportion of books to open space where that goes, but the Closet is still relatively sparse; the bookshelf’s stuffed so full it sometimes creaks randomly from the strain, but there are only, like, six books on the desk right now, and Ed’s been reading two of them pretty regularly.

The real question is whether Al ever made good on his vow to stash some spare clothes here for them after that time they got the call while he was taking a bubble bath, and there wasn’t time for him to put on anything except damp underwear and his fluffy yellow bathrobe, and everyone in the entire place was either checking out his legs (Ed glared at those) or laughing behind their hands (Ed joined them).  The house slippers really completed that whole look; Ed doesn’t think Al’ll ever be more ready for his fashion magazine cover shoot than he was that day.

In the meantime, Ed opens and shuts the desk drawers—fighting his instinct to start pulling them in the semi-random order of most-likely-places-for-clothes-according-to-his-own-brain.  He’s trying to teach himself to be methodical about that kind of shit, not least because it’s not unimaginable that Al might’ve put them in a weird spot specifically to test him on it.

He starts at the top left and works his way down, then starts his way back up—and finds them in the right-bottom drawer, underneath a piece of tissue paper, because… well, who the hell knows why Al thought that was necessary, but it’s too late now.

There is definitely not enough in here, though—not enough for it to be one set for each of them.  And not enough skulls and red accents for Al to have pulled anything out of Ed’s stash of clothing, such as it is.

That little _shit_.  He must’ve just grabbed something he isn’t in love with from his own expansive selection of clothes and crap—Al owns about a million damn shirts alone, and Ed can’t bear to stop him from buying more, because he “just loves textures so _much_ , Brother” and whatever other shit—and decided that Ed can always, like, _roll up the fucking sleeves_ and make do.

Ed looks down at his pajama pants, which are a faded, randomly bleach-stained blue flannel paired with a gray T-shirt that’s sort of starting to fall apart.  Then he looks over at the neatly-folded forest-green button-down shirt and brown corduroy trousers he just set on the desktop.

He would look like a fucking nerd in those.  He looks like a fucking nerd right now.  He’s between a nerd-rock and a nerdy fucking place here.

After an extremely long moment of agonizing vacillation, he trades out the pajama pants.  Whoever allowed Al to believe that wearing corduroy is anything but an unforgivable act of wardrobe warfare—Ed would _never_ have let him buy this atrocious fucking article of so-called ‘clothing’—is officially on Ed’s shit list from now until eternity.

The really horrible thing is that they’re _comfortable_.  Cozy, even.  So Ed can kind of understand why—if one was an unconscionable, incorrigible fucking dork who didn’t care about going around in public looking humiliatingly un-badass—a person might wear these goddamn things.

At least his coat’s long enough that it kind of disguises the monstrosity of it all; maybe if people just glance at him, they won’t notice.

Oh fucking well.  He’s got bigger problems today.  It’s sort of a tragic reflection on the state of his life that he doesn’t have much energy to spare for hating on corduroy, isn’t it?

He pulls on his coat to make it cover as much as he can, and then he tucks his book under his right arm, steps out of the Closet, locks the door behind him, and starts back for the hospital proper.

His paramedic friend took off, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to do what he promised her.  Once he gets his corduroy-clad ass in through the ER again, it doesn’t take long to find someone who heard about this whole thing, and he gets directed over to the little girl’s room in a matter of minutes.

There’s a nurse sitting at the bedside with a clipboard—probably filling out forms or something; you just can’t escape the fucking paperwork no matter what field your job’s in, can you?—who looks up at him as he steps through the doorway.

“Are you Ed?” she asks.  At the nod, which is much less bewildered these days than it was the first time somebody knew him by description around here, she smiles slightly.  “She’s not awake yet, but you’re welcome to wait if you like.”

“Thanks,” he says.

And he does.

And it’s not until half an hour of Asclepius later—not until a rustle of sheets, and a soft whimper, and the nurse standing up, and him instinctively shoving the book aside and getting to his feet—that he realizes the part of this that he was missing.

It’s not until she stirs and opens her eyes, and they’re an unmistakable ruby-red.

He wasn’t really paying attention to anything except the damage in the OR—certainly not to the contrast between her hair and her skin.  He might’ve registered it offhandedly; just figured she was a pale blonde kid who’d been out in the sun a lot lately.

She’s Ishvalan.

And that shouldn’t change a damn thing, but it _does_.

Not about her, though.  Not about this second, and what she’s feeling, and how hard his heart rocks forward against his sternum, because he _knows_ —

And he crosses the space in three strides and sinks to his knees at the bedside to take her hand as her eyes well, and she starts to scrabble around on the sheets.

“Hey,” he says, and she gasps a little, and her breath sticks wetly, and the tears wobble on her lash line for a second before they start to fall.

“Where—” she chokes, hiccups.  “Where—”

“Your brother’s just in the other room,” he says.  “Okay?  You both got hurt pretty bad, but he’s going to be fine.  You know how I know?  ’Cause my brother was the one who took care of him.  And he’s the _best_.”

She grips his hand, and her tiny little shoulders start to shake, and the pain of it crinkles up the corners of her eyes.  “Wh-what h-h-happened?”

“There was a fire at your house,” he says.  Fuck this.  This is the worst shit anybody could ever have to do; how are you supposed to find the words to tell a fucking _child_ that her life just got ripped apart?  “You remember anything?  It seemed like you were looking after your brother.”

She twists her hand, and he lets go, and she scrubs at her eyes with it.  He grabs her a tissue; she’s trying so hard, and it must fucking _hurt_ , and he doesn’t know… how to do this.  He doesn’t know if he can.  But he fucking has to; he _owes_ it to her.

“I th-think s-s-so,” she manages.  She crumples the tissue up in her hand instead of using it, and the tears just leak out onto the pillow, and Ed’s heart clenches up so small it feels like his whole chest cavity’s going to collapse around it.  “I d-dunno.  It was—it was so h-hot, there was—it was d-d-dark, and Xander—that’s my b-brother; his n-n-name’s—” She sobs, and then she cringes.

He can’t help himself; he reaches out and starts stroking back her hair.

“It’s okay,” he says.  “He’s okay.  He’s just fine.  And you’re gonna be fine, too—you know you are; you’re so strong.  You saved him, you know that?  I’m so proud of you.  You’re so brave.”  He swallows, and swallows again.  “You’re just going to have to keep being brave for a little longer.”

  


* * *

  


He talks to her for a couple minutes after that—mostly about Xander and all the stuff he likes; he’s just learning how to read, and his favorite thing is scary monster stories, but he also really likes flying machines.  Then the pain starts to overwhelm her, and she can’t stop crying, and the nurse very carefully doses her up with something that puts her right to sleep.

Her name is Liandra.

She likes stories about princesses who save the day.  There aren’t a lot of them out there, so she was writing one.

Once the nurse has checked all the bandage dressings, she tells him that someone got ahold of Liandra’s parents’ next-of-kin—they’ve got an aunt and uncle out in Ishval who are already on a train towards Central.  They should be here by tonight.

They’ve got somebody.  They’re going to make it—somehow, some way, they will.  The fire in her eyes isn’t out; every time she talks about her brother, you can tell she’d do anything it takes for him.  What it’s going to take is surviving.  And they will.

He starts walking back to the Closet on his _bum-ass fucking leg_ so he can get to their phone.  The stupid sky hasn’t even started spitting yet; it’s just threatening ever more avidly with progressively darker stupid clouds.  Fucking figures it won’t even get this shit over with—it’s just gonna _sit_ like that and torment him for as long as it can.

After a long fucking stroll punctuated by a lot of fucking muttering, he drops into the creaky rolling chair behind their desk in the Closet, and he picks up the receiver, and he dials.

He tends to get a bad feeling about Roy’s impulse control-slash-ability to separate his self-worth from his work ethic these days.  Not that Ed would know anything about that, obviously; it’s a completely objective observation that bears no relation to him in any way.

But it’s why he calls the office first.

Roy picks up on the second ring.

“Mustang.”

“What the hell are you doing working on a Saturday?” Ed asks.

Roy takes a breath to speak, and then he pauses.  “Is this a secure line?”

Apparently Ed’s not too tired for another shot of fucking adrenaline.  “South wing of Central Hospital.  Why?”

“I was going to say ‘It’s a free country’,” Roy says.  “Followed by something I could get in a great deal of trouble for.”  That wrings a smile out of Ed, at least.  Roy doesn’t give him long to savor it.  “What’s wrong?”

Funny how he knows.  Sure, Ed’s calling him on a weekend from the hospital; sure, he wouldn’t harass the workaholic bastard if it wasn’t important.  But it’s still funny that he _knows_.

“Nothing I can prove,” Ed says.  “Just—got a nasty case here, and I started thinking about it too much.”

“I hope it goes without saying,” Roy says, “that your thoughts are enormously valuable.”

“Go ahead,” Ed says.

He’d bet two hundred thousand cens that Roy’s blinking owlishly.  “Beg your pardon?”

“Go ahead and say my ‘enormously valuable’ thoughts are ‘ironically disproportionate’ or whatever shit,” Ed says.

Equivalent fucking exchange: he can hear the grin in Roy’s voice when the bastard answers.  “I wouldn’t dream of saying anything of the sort.”

“Right,” Ed says.  “And I was born yesterday.  In a barn.  Without a single brain cell.  Anyway—the thing is… I mean, maybe I’m a little paranoid, y’know, after all the shit we… did.  And saw.  But wouldn’t it seem a little suspicious to you if a nice house in a _new_ neighborhood suddenly caught fuckin’ fire and burned to the ground, and the only people on the whole street who got hurt were the Ishvalan family who’d just moved into the place?”

There’s silence on the line for a long couple of seconds except for Roy breathing softly.

“It would seem very suspicious indeed,” he says right before Ed starts to squirm.  “Are you going over there?”

“Damn fucking right,” Ed says.

“I thought you might say that,” Roy says.  “May I come with you?”

Ed blinks at the wall.  “What?”

“To the house,” Roy says.  “May I come wi—”

“I heard you,” Ed says.  “It was a ‘What’ like… confused.  Surprised.  Don’t you have better shit to do?”

“That’s arguable,” Roy says.  “If this is what it sounds like, none of the deplorably dull papers currently strewn across my desk have anywhere near as much significance as what you just told me.”

Ed pauses a second to sift through that piece of shit excuse for a sentence.  “So… what you’re trying to say is that your job isn’t important.”

Roy pauses for a second of his own.

And then he fucking _laughs_.

“Shall I come and pick you up?” he asks.

“You didn’t answer the question,” Ed says.

“It wasn’t a question,” Roy says.  “You made it a statement.  I know better than to try to change your mind.”

“At least I taught you that much,” Ed says.

“And more,” Roy says.  “I can be out front of the emergency room in twenty minutes if that works for you.”

“Sure,” Ed says.

And it’s funny, too—he kind of had the upper hand for most of that conversation, and at the same time it felt like _falling_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The good news is that I finally actually _finished_ this thing. The bad news is that I think a number of you are going to be disappointed with the direction of it given the things you've very kindly mentioned that you were looking forward to in the comments… Sorry! ;__;
> 
> Also, bit of a blood/gore CW for this chapter (nothing any worse than canon) – stay safe, guys. ♥

Roy’s early.  Of course he is.  The bastard.

Ed pointedly ignores the little Al voice in the back of his head saying _You would be saying the same thing if he was late, or on-time, or really anything in between—what do you think that means, Brother?_

Whatever.  It doesn’t mean anything, because back-of-his-head Al is full of shit.

He forces his achy leg—and the less-achy one—to carry him over to the shiny black car, and then he convinces both of them to drop the rest of him into the passenger seat.

“Are you all right?” Roy asks, sounding—startled, or something.  Concerned.  Like he means it.  Like he cares.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He has to relinquish his death grip on Asclepius in order to put his seatbelt on.  You don’t take chances with that shit when Roy’s driving.  “It’s just this—” He gestures upward.  “—crap weather.”

“Are you sure you want to do this now?” Roy asks.  “I could drive you home.  We could go tomorrow.”

“Nah,” Ed says.  “Better do it now.  Fuck knows what’ll get covered up in a day.”

Roy smiles thinly.  “About that ‘free country’ I mentioned…”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Exactly.  The paramedic said it’s right around Calverson.”

“Ah,” Roy says.  He left the car idling this whole time; he pulls away from the curb and starts for the road.  “I heard there were some fights about that development in the city planning office.  It had been an orchard for as long as anyone could remember.”

“Maybe it should’ve stayed that way,” Ed says, folding his arms across Asclepius.  “At this rate.”

“Maybe it should have,” Roy says softly.

  


* * *

  


Part of the reason Ed doesn’t spend much time around here is that the shops and shit are all targeted towards people who have the kind of money he can’t even really understand.

Another part of the reason is that Calverson Avenue is a fucking nightmare channeled into a road.

“Can you park somewhere over here?” Ed asks.  “I guess we’re gonna be stupid-obvious either way—” At least Roy’s not wearing his uniform.  Must’ve been fun trying to get clearance into HQ without the blues, but it’d be a touch hypocritical of Ed to blame him for ditching the stiff, stuffy wool at every opportunity.  “—but I figure we should walk in.”

“That sounds good to me,” Roy says.  “Especially since—I think it’s the result of all of the city-planning altercations—they did something very odd here.  I believe you can cut through behind the tailor’s on foot, but if you’re driving, you have to go half a mile around, so…”

 _So_ , he whips them into an open stretch of curb so fast and so recklessly that Ed’s head spins, and his heart leaps, and only the bizarrely bright focused intensity of Roy’s eyes on the road can ground him again.

“Holy hell,” Ed chokes out around the lump of cardiac muscle blocking his throat.  He can’t believe the book hasn’t split down the spine from the way he’s clinging to it.

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Roy asks, killing the engine.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “And I’m a regular fucking moron for getting in a car with your dumb ass when I _know_ what’s gonna happen.”

Roy—

Fucking laughs.  Not too loud, and not too hard, but genuinely, and that’s… weird.  He’s weird.  It’s all weird.  This whole fucking country is going to the dogs, pun about the military totally intended or whatever.

Ed leaves Asclepius on his seat, hops out, and slams the door before the rest of the universe can collapse.  He eyes the sky, which is also still plotting against him.  What a stupid fucking day this is all around.

“You ready?” he asks, glancing back at Roy as he starts to step out to cross the road.  He’s pretty sure he can see the tailor shop Roy was talking about; at least the bastard parked close, so Ed won’t have to walk too far on this bum fucking le—

Roy’s hand clenches in the back of his coat and jerks him backwards _hard_ —he stumbles back against the hood of the car, and the fingers seizing the fabric of his coat curl a little tighter, and—

A truck rockets by so fast and so fucking close that the exhaust makes his eyes water, and the wind hauls on his hair.

He forces himself to take a deep breath.  The skittering of his pulse is fucking distracting, and he’s not sure he dares to look over at Roy; probably the bastard’s going to rub his face in that for the rest of his damn life.

He sort of has to, though.  Because Roy just saved his sorry ass, no two ways about it.

Funny enough, there’s really no gloating at all in Roy’s expression—just a strange sort of tension softened at the edges by relief.

“Careful,” Roy says.

“Shit,” Ed says.  “I—” _Ptatptatptatptat_.  Can’t be healthy to send his heartrate ricocheting to the furthest reaches of the spectrum of anatomical possibility every five minutes, can it?  “Thanks.”  He clears his throat.  Roy finally lets go of his fucking coat, and sort of smoothes it down, and that’s awkward as fuck, so probably Ed should say something else.  “Fuck’s sake, isn’t this supposed to be the ‘nice’ part of your stupid city, Mustang?”

Roy smiles, and steps up onto the sidewalk, and leads the way down towards the stoplight, where maybe it’s possible to cross this fucking death trap without getting ground into bloody pulp under the tires of a speeding vehicle.

“You call it ‘my’ city rather regularly for someone who’s resided here nearly as long as I have,” Roy says.

“Well, it is your city,” Ed says, looking both fucking ways more than once this time—he’s proud, sure, and that sometimes makes him stupid; but he’s not an _idiot_.  “Your region.  Your country.  Your whole planet, if you get that far.  I thought that was the deal.”

“I don’t believe we discussed world domination in the conditions of your loan,” Roy says.  His hand does a strange little thing where it sort of starts to jump up like he’s about to put it in front of Ed, then hesitates in the air like he’s about to put it behind Ed’s back instead, and then drops to his side.  He _also_ looks back and forth a couple times before he starts out into the street.  “I can’t make any guarantees, but…”

“‘Roy Mustang for World Dictator’,” Ed says.  “Nice ring to that.”

Roy smiles at him.  _Again_.  What the fuck is with this day?  “You think so?”

Ed shrugs with the left shoulder only, because the right one is a big, fat, swelling well of agony right this second.  “You might want to tone it down on the campaign posters, but it’s a good place to start.”

“If you’re tired of the hospital,” Roy says, “I’ll hire you as my PR campaign manager.”

They’re across the street.

They look at each other.

They both make seriously dumb fucking faces trying not to laugh.

“That’d be a canny political decision if I ever saw one,” Ed says.

“A stroke of genius,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  But that’s not what they’re here for; that’s not what this whole trip is about.  He squares his shoulders as much as he can without exacerbating the right one, looks at the shopfronts ahead of them, and nods towards the green-and-white awning not far down the street.  “Is that the right tailor?”

“I believe it is,” Roy says.  “Shall we?”

  


* * *

  


It is the right one—taking _right_ to mean _equipped with a little backalley stuffed with dumpsters they have to sidle past so that it’ll let them out into a ditch thick with grabby thistles with some brackish water at the bottom, which leads up onto an unreasonably steep slope that brings them onto a street packed with a dozen crisply-painted new homes_.

Just three houses down, there’s a burnt-out fucking shell on one of the lots.

Ed’s stomach just—

Goes.  Twists up, tightens, lurches, whirls—and his vision glazes; everything goes out of focus, and hazy shadows creep in at the corners—

He knows this _smell_ ; he knows this _feeling_ —spiraling, endless, meaningless abjection—blackened beams like spars of driftwood jutting from a shipwreck on a shoal—

“Edward,” Roy’s voice says, gently, in the distance, and his hand settles on Ed’s left shoulder and starts to squeeze.  “Are you—”

Ed drags in a deep breath.  That was a long time ago.  He’s different now; the whole fucking world is different now; he’s _fixed_ everything he’d broken.  This is Liandra’s hell, not his.  And he’s going to help her, if he can.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Fine.  Sorry.  All good.  So what’s your plan?”

His damn eyes are working again, thank fuck.  Roy’s blinking at him.  His nerves are also working: Roy’s hand lingers on his shoulder for a second before it gets withdrawn.

“What do you mean, my plan?” Roy asks.  “This was your idea.”

“I know,” Ed says.  He jerks his chin towards the remains of the house.  “But my plan is to skulk around and trespass a little and ask people rude-ass questions, so I figured I’d give you a chance to come up with something less likely to end in jail time and tears.”

Roy’s smile is vaguely enigmatic and not-so-vaguely obnoxious.  “Unsurprisingly, you have even managed to stamp your personal seal on the process of growing up.”  Ed opens his mouth to ask what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but—typically—Roy doesn’t give him time.  “In that case, my plan is to investigate as legally as possible, and if we can find a relatively conclusive indication of foul play, I’ll get some good people put on it.”

There’s something wrong with him these days—he can’t _doubt_ Roy anymore.  The only person in his whole stupid life that he’s ever trusted to do something as well as or better than he’d do it himself is Al, but when Roy says something like that—makes an offhanded promise to take care of something Ed intended to handle personally—Ed… trusts him.  Ed trusts him to do it, and do it fucking right.  These days, when Roy makes promises, they feel like fact.

“You get ten minutes,” Ed says.  “Then I’m knockin’ down some doors.”

Roy grins, and Ed starts striding for the house as fast as he can bear it on the automail, because that expression on Roy is just—uncanny.  It makes his guts do weird, squiggly, warm shit that he doesn’t like, and he’s endured enough fucking gastrointestinal distress for one day.

  


* * *

  


It only takes nine minutes to turn up the scorched, crumpled remnants of a couple of cans of gasoline.  They’re all nestled close in by a few fragments of a piece of wall, like someone tossed them in against the house just in case they’d bolster the fire a little more with whatever was left dripping down the insides.  In one of the side-yard spaces of the lot, there’s a battered, sooty, empty fire extinguisher.  There are traces of foam on the adjacent wall of the nearest house—which sustained such minimal damage that it barely even needs new paint.

Roy stands there looking up at it with both hands in his pockets for a long couple of seconds.  He always looks so damn different without the uniform on—different lines; different shapes.

But the eyes always remind you that it’s him in there—Roy fucking Mustang, sharper than the edge of any blade Ed’s ever tested.

“I was trying very hard to hope,” Roy says.  “I thought there might just be a possibility that people were better than that.”  His shoulders rise and fall with a sigh too soft for Ed to hear.  “Well—I’ll get someone here today, before these nice little bits of evidence decide to wander off.”

Ed wants to kick the extinguisher, but that sounds like a colossally shitty idea in the circumstances.  “Thanks.”

Roy glances at him and smiles wearily.  “For doing what little I can to counterbalance the unimaginable weight of human cruelty?”

“Fuck,” Ed says.  His stomach just keeps flipping; what a lousy fucking traitorous excuse for an organ.  “Come on.  Let’s get out of here.  And let’s talk about something _else_.”

“Fair enough,” Roy says, following him as he stomps back out towards the sidewalk again.  The clouds are still curdling to ever-darker shades of gray, and he can smell the gathering humidity in the air now, but it still hasn’t let loose a single fucking drop.  “What would you like to talk about?”

Ed probably shouldn’t say this while they’re moving, so he stops.

“You,” he says.

Roy blinks repeatedly at him, which is really stupid-looking, and also a tiny bit cute.  There’s something—kittenish—to it.

“What about me?” Roy asks.

Ed eyes him.  “I’m trying to figure out your fucking game lately.”

Roy blinks again, but this time with a fake innocence that’s half patently ridiculous and half kind of funny.  “Heaven forbid,” he says, “that after all these years, you should try _asking_.”

Ed folds both arms and raises one eyebrow.  One of the arms protests, though neither of the eyebrows do.  “And get a twisty-bullshit answer?”

Roy pauses.  “That’s… fair.”  He raises an eyebrow right back.  They probably look fucking hilarious.  “All right,” he says.  “I swear that I will answer you one question—and only one question—absolutely honestly.  How’s that for a peace offering?”

“Oh, good,” Ed says through a grimace.  “I’m your diplomatic guinea pig.  How’d you know that’s what I always wanted?”  He waves both hands, which the right arm also hates, because the right arm hates everything today.  “Wait—don’t you dare fuckin’ answer that as my one question.  I—” This is the hard part.  That’s sort of equivalent, though, in a way.  He looks down at the sidewalk, which is a much easier target than Roy’s eyes.  “Well—shit.  Why’ve you been going so far out of your way to, like, keep in touch and whatever shit?  I mean—it’s more than just… ex-coworker shit.  It’s more than just ‘We’ve got history, so I kind of care about making sure Al turns out okay.’  You _work_ at it.  And you’re busy; I know you are.  It’s not easy for you to fit us in, but you always do.  It always seems like you _want_ to.”  He looks up.  He can manage that much.  “Why?”

Roy’s eyes go wide, and then they flick away, and it’s hard to fault him for that.  This is a stupid conversation on a stupid day full of stupid shit, and Ed shouldn’t have asked.

But he has to know.

He has to know if he’s making it the fuck up; if his instincts are _wrong_ ; if the flit of his pulse in his throat, like a dozen half-formed words every fucking second, really _means_ something, or if it’s just…

If Roy’s just trying to be… nice.

The tip of Roy’s tongue slips out between his parted lips and runs across the upper one.

Ed can really taste that fucking humidity now.

Roy draws a breath, and then he speaks.  “I… found,” he says, “in that first two-month stretch where you and your brother went home to rest—we all missed you more than we bargained for, I believe.  And I felt—I don’t know; it all sounds so… melodramatic… spelled out.  I felt… lost—bereft, adrift, deprived—in a way I’m not sure I can explain.”  He clears his throat, and shuffles his feet, and puts his hands into his pockets again.  Ed’s mesmerized.  His heart keeps on fucking banging.  Roy, discomfited like this, is practically unheard of.  “Once you moved back here,” the bastard says, “I realized that it would be a matter of only a little bit of effort—comparatively speaking, anyway—to keep you in all of our lives.  I just had to put the time in, and we’d all be the better for it.”

That sounds…

Pretty fucking realistic, actually.

But Roy’s still not looking at him, which means the fucker has something to hide.

“That’s not the whole fuckin’ story, though,” Ed says.  “Is it?”

Roy smiles faintly.  “You have gotten to be too dangerous by half.”  Ed’s not sure precisely what that’s supposed to mean, but he has to admit he likes the sound of it.  Roy, meanwhile, looks out across the street and takes a deep breath.  “There is… I think there’s something… else… in it.  It’s difficult to be sure; I’m not trying to be deliberately evasive.  It’s only… I’ve been wondering about this for a while now—don’t you think—doesn’t it seem to you like we’ve always been drawn together, one way or another?  More than just two ordinary people whose lives happened to coincide; more than just acquaintance.  Like we’re more similar than that, and at the same time, there’s this—symmetry to it; an opposition, like poles of a magnet, and—there’s a _pull_.”  He glances over, swallows hard— “Isn’t there?  Or is it just—” His mouth quirks, but it’d be stupid to call that a smile.  “Is it just… me?”

Ed’s breath scrapes into his mouth, wriggles down his throat, dissipates in his lungs, exchanges a couple of atoms, bubbles back up, and rasps back out of him.

“Exactly what the fuck are you trying to say?” he gets out.  “That we’re—that there’s something—what, fucking—cosmic?  Like—”

He won’t say it; he won’t say the word _destiny_ ; that is never, ever gonna happen, no matter what kind of bizarre and inexplicable tingling takes up underneath his skin.

Roy’s chest fills, and Ed can’t help that his eyes dart to where the bastard left his first two shirt buttons undone, putting the hollow of his collarbones on tantalizing fucking display.

“I don’t know,” Roy says.  “I’ve just had this sense for a very long time that we’re—connected.  In some capacity that matters a great d—”

A shriek of rusted brakes mingled with an ear-splitting squeal of tires makes Ed jump almost out of his fucking skin—and then the terrified human scream that follows instantaneously freezes all the blood in his body.

And Roy—

Is off at a run—off running _towards_ it.

No second thought; no questions—just someone who needs help, and Roy Mustang answering the call.

And Ed… loves him for that.  For that unswayed, unqualified, undeniable compulsion to do right.  Roy’s a long way from fucking perfect, sure, but at the _core_ , he’s so goddamn decent that it gets overwhelming to think about on nights when the mattress won’t yield a soft spot, and there’s too much light through the window, and the clock’s counting out the agonizingly slow fucking hours towards dawn.

Not that Ed would know anything about that.

Despite the howling misery of the automail port, he books it after Roy, right towards the source of the sound.

He knows what they’re going to find before they get there—just not the details.

The details are shit.

Based solely on the blood splattered up the hood of the car and pooling underneath the crumpled body, Ed knows that the guy isn’t going to make it.

But it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if everything inside him feels like cold granite; it doesn’t matter if the grind of his organs against each other hurts his own damn ears.  He’s kneeling next to the guy—the _kid_ , who’s one, maybe two years younger than he is—and very gently touching the shoulder that’s still erratically rising and falling for however long is left.

Turns out corduroy soaks up blood like a fucking sponge.  Ed’s right knee’s wet—and warm; the liquid is still fucking _hot_ when it seeps through.

“Hey,” Ed says softly.  The guy’s curled up around himself.  There’s a fucking dent in his fucking skull; there’s a fucking dent in his fucking _ribcage_ ; there’s blood dribbling out the corner of his mouth.  He opens his eyes—panicked, wild, glassy at first; they fix on Ed’s face, and he tries to suck in a deep breath, and it sticks wetly, and he coughs up so much fucking _red_ —

Ed can’t make this worse.  There’s nothing _to_ make worse.  This was over before they got here.  A part of him wonders where Roy ended up—distantly he hears the comforting familiarity of that stupid-gorgeous too-low voice, dealing out what sounds like instructions, or maybe commands.  Marshaling the fucking troops, only they’re civilians, today, and he’s keeping them away from this.  Probably he’s already shoved someone towards a phone booth or into a store to call an ambulance.  Probably he doesn’t know for sure—not like Ed knows it; not carved-marble-certain—that it isn’t going to matter.

“I’m a doctor,” Ed says, carefully sliding his right arm underneath the kid’s shoulders.  He gets a damp whimper for that; everything must hurt so fucking much; it’s remarkable that any of it fucking registers.  He reaches across the guy’s body and touches his left palm to his right.  “What’s your name?”

He sets his jaw to suppress the instinct to wince at the way the blood drowns the kid’s first attempt at a response—just sick, wet burbling; no identifiable sounds.  The kid manages another wracking cough, and his whole body shudders against Ed’s arm—there has to be fucking something Ed can _do_ ; there has to—

The alchemic energy is still running through the circle he made with his arms, humming in the core of him, sizzling in his chest—he lays his left palm gently down over the blood-slicked ridges of the kid’s throat and closes his eyes for a second, envisioning the damage, trying to _predict_ —

There’s only so much he can guess at without having seen what happened—where the impacts were, what the trauma was.  He could fix a lot more if this kid was on an operating table; if they sedated him and cut him open, and all the specifics of the brokenness were laid bare.

But he wouldn’t make it that far.

Ed figures there must be some major bruising in the windpipe; the whole esophagus seems flooded, by the constant, choking ooze of blood out of the kid’s mouth—he tries to clear it up, tries to get it open, tries to reinforce the walls or… _something_.  He can hear his own heartbeat starting to hammer too fast, and the bright-frantic feeling cresting in him can only mean another fucking rush of adrenaline, which is the harbinger of panic, which—

He knows it’s too late.  He knows there’s nothing he can do.

And it’s _shit_.  It’s all shit; everything about this—

The pale blue crackling ceases, and he withdraws his hand.  The guy’s eyes are a tiny bit clearer.  He wheezes softly—wet, still, but then—

“Erik,” he says.  “M-my name—you’re a—?”

“Doctor,” Ed says.  “Well, alchemist-doctor, I guess.  Sorta-kinda.”  He reaches over the caved-in part of Erik’s chest to tap his left palm on the right one again.  Bone.  He’s going to start with the bone.  It’s probably halfway through this kid’s lungs; that’s got to be where most of the blood came from.  “I’m going to take care of you, okay?”

He should lie.  He should lie and say _You’re going to be all right._

He can hear somebody crying.  A voice that sounds like Roy’s is shushing them.  Maybe the bystanders are getting seriously freaked; or maybe Erik’s got a friend or a family member who had to watch this happen; or maybe the reality of this just hit the person who was driving the car.

“Okay,” Erik says.  “I—it hurts, it—”

“I know,” Ed says.  He flattens his hand on Erik’s sternum.  He can fix this much.  “I’ve got you.  Just hold on for me, okay?”

“It h-hurts,” Erik says.  The alchemy sears outward under Ed’s hand; a tendril of light shimmers along each rib, tiny streams of lightning coursing through the bloodied fabric of what used to be a yellow shirt.  “I—I’m so—cold.  It’s so c-cold.”

His eyes dart right, and left, and up, and then start filming over—slowly, glassy like marbles.  Like a light, light, drifting curl of mist.

This is it.

Ed’s throat tightens.  He shoves the words up through it.  “I’m sorry.  Hey.  Stay with me, Erik.  Come on.”

“I’m s-so cold,” Erik says.  His hand twitches—fingers moving upward, like he’s pointing, or reaching.  “Can you—I’m so _cold_ —”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He shifts his knees back, leans down, and wraps both arms around Erik’s torso, drawing him as carefully as possible into a hug.  He presses his cheek against the intact side of Erik’s forehead and closes his eyes and tries to keep fucking breathing.  Everything is soaked—his shirt, the corduroy; he can hear it dripping from the automail to the pavement; he can feel it trickling between the fingers of his other hand.  “I got you.”

“So cold,” Erik whispers.  He shivers hard, once, in against Ed’s chest.  “It’s so…”

Ed waits.  He waits until he’s _sure_ —until all the motion stops.  Until there’s no breathing, and no trembling, and no pulse beating feebly back against his skin.

Then he lays the body gently on the ground and sits back.

He extends his arm to try to close Erik’s eyelids, but his left hand’s shaking so hard he doesn’t trust it to do the job.

When the first droplet splashes on the back, his brain completely fails to process the phenomenon for a long second.  A second follows, and a third, and the fourth lands right on his knuckles and splits like a forking river around them.

About time it quit equivocating and finally started to rain.

Movement to his right makes him turn.  It’s Roy, crouching down beside him, looking at the corpse.

Roy’s left arm wraps itself around his shoulders.  Roy’s right hand is steadier than his was, and it reaches out and coaxes Erik’s eyes shut and then draws back.

“I’m sorry,” Roy says softly.  “Do you need a minute?”

Ed swallows all the things he wants to say about the world, about people, about himself.

“Nah,” he says instead.  It grates against the dust of the possibilities.  “I’m fine.”

Roy’s right arm fits itself under Ed’s automail elbow.  He’s ensconced, enclosed, enveloped—words like that.  _En_ -words.  It’s nice, kind of.  The raindrops are fucking cold against his scalp; they roll slow and ineluctable down his temples and his forehead and his neck.

That’s probably supposed to be a sign that he should get up.

He tries to shift back and put some weight on his feet—this ain’t exactly his first rodeo as far as that goes, and he makes it most of the way upright before his right knee buckles, and Roy’s grip on him is the only thing that keeps him off the pavement.

“Easy,” Roy says.  “They should be here any—”

Sirens.

Everything gets—blurry—after that.  Headlights flare all over; the rain comes down in sheets.  The same girl from before who was smoking outside the ER is the first one who climbs down out of the ambulance.  She looks at him, and he looks back, and all she says is “Shit.”

Somebody puts a blanket around his shoulders, which poses a bit of a challenge because he’s still got Roy around them, too.

Roy doesn’t once ask him if he’s okay.  Roy doesn’t once ask him if he’s ready to go.  Roy just stands there, and stays there, and holds on.

And it rains.

Ed waits until they’ve put the body in one of the big black bags and zipped it up and lifted it onto a stretcher to pack it into the back of the ambulance.  Then he moves to wrangle the blanket off—Roy lets go and takes one step back to give him space to maneuver—and balls it up.  He’s not sure why they’d want it back now that it’s covered in rain-diluted blood and looks like shit, but when he offers it to one of the paramedics, they take it.

Roy maintains a two-step distance while Ed hands it over and crosses the street back to Roy’s car.  They’ll be taking down the roadblock any minute, probably; better to go now.  He looks down at the passenger window, and he can just see the cover of Asclepius through the streaks of rain along the glass.

“I’m gonna get blood all over your seat,” he says.

“I don’t mind,” Roy says.

Ed’s focus wobbles, and he stops seeing the book and starts seeing his own reflection.

Mistake.

“Al can’t see me like this,” he says.  “He’ll fucking freak.”  The rain’s made it impossible for the blood to dry, so the corduroy just feels… thick.  Sloshy and heavy and wet.  “These are his pants.”

Roy’s just—standing there still.  Standing next to him in the pouring fucking rain, not even fucking rushing him while he makes up his mind.

“You could clean up at my place if you like,” Roy says.  “I imagine I could find some clothes that would fit you if we roll up the cuffs a couple dozen times.”

Ed summons up a glare for him.

Roy smiles weakly.

“All right,” Ed says.  “If you’re sure you want me in your inner sanctum or whatever.”

“I’m sure,” Roy says.

Roy unlocks the car, and Ed gingerly moves his book out of the way before dropping his soaking wet ass into the seat.

It could’ve been him.

It could’ve been him; it could’ve been _Al_ —

And it should’ve been him—shouldn’t it?

He’s done everything he meant to—been everything he should have; accomplished pretty much the fucking pinnacle of what he’s capable of.  It wouldn’t be so bad if he just… silently went away.  There wouldn’t be anything undone, or anything unanswered, or anything to miss.  Not really.

Roy settles into the driver’s seat next to him—but not until after very cautiously relocating Asclepius to the backseat so that neither of them will drip rainwater on the pages.

He doesn’t start the car.  Instead he says, so quietly that Ed could almost pretend he didn’t hear, “Do you want to talk about it?”

The bastard.  The fucking bastard; how _dare_ he fucking _care_ so much in all the right fucking ways—

“No,” Ed says.  He wets his lips, which seems stupid; his face has been wet this whole time, and all of a sudden his mouth feels dry.  “Thanks.  But—not yet.”

“All right,” Roy says, still so fucking softly he sounds like a different version of himself.  “No obligation at all.”

“It’s just—” He knows better; he knows well enough by now to shut his fucking mouth instead of dumping all his bullshit on somebody else; he _knows_ — “What’s the point, right?  What’s the fucking point of coming all this way and doing all this shit and being a _medic_ if I can’t even—if I can’t fucking _do_ anything when somebody needs it the most?”

“No one could have done anything,” Roy says.  “It was too late by the time—”

“I _know_ ,” Ed says, trying to push a hand through his hair—too wet, too tangled; at least he used the left hand, so it’s not so fucking stuck he’d need scissors to extract it.  “But that’s—that’s all I’ve been fucking trying to do for—since—if I can’t do _anything_ , it’s just like Nina all over again.  I just have to _sit_ there and watch somebody die because I’m not fucking good enough to make a fucking difference.”

“Ed,” Roy says—still quietly, still in a low register, but with so much steel underneath that Ed has no choice but to look over at him.  His eyes are pure fucking starlight.  The rain beats on the windshield, and Ed’s heart beats in his throat, and this _is_ fucking cosmic, isn’t it?  Somehow, some way— “You are, past a shadow of a doubt, one of the best men I have ever known.  If anyone could have saved him, it would have been you.  And you knew you couldn’t—from the first second, you knew he was dead.  And instead of walking away from that, you made his last few minutes on this wretched planet as warm and as pleasant as you could.”

Ed trains his eyes on the ceiling of the car so he doesn’t have to face the earnest fucking intensity of Roy’s expression right now.  “But it wasn’t _enough_.”

“But you are,” Roy says.  “You’re enough, Ed—you _are_.  And so, so much more.”

Ed risks a glance.

He still looks so fucking sincere it’s like…

It’s like the stars are falling—every single last fucking constellation.  Like the whole damn sky is coming down.

“We should get going,” Ed says.  “I told Al I’d be home by dinner.”

Roy swallows.  His shirt’s soaked; it’s clinging to his collarbones.  His hair’s draggling in his face.

He’s gorgeous.  He’s always been gorgeous.

And Ed’s a mess.

There’s nothing mystical about anything that has to do with him.

Al’s wrong.  And Roy’s wrong.  And he was wrong, in that second there where he believed it.

  


* * *

  


It’s still raining fucking buckets when Roy parks the car in front of a nice little townhouse and promptly lets them into it.  Ed figures he’ll come back for the book later when it’s not as likely to get instantaneously waterlogged.

Roy toes his shoes off in the entryway, so Ed figures it’s polite to follow suit or whatever.

He even goes to the trouble of gesturing to one of the hooks on the wall and tugging on the lapel of his coat.  “You want me to…?”

“Hardly matters,” Roy says, “but if you’d like, then…”

How fucking cute; they’re being all noncommittal and civilized at each other.  Nothing’s ever going to get said or done again, at this rate.

Ed tries to shrug his coat off—forgetting, of course, that his shoulder’s jacked up to hell with the recent barometric acrobatics, and he ends up hissing aloud at the swell of pain.

“Oh, hell,” Roy says, and his hands are moving around Ed’s back yet again.  To his credit, though, he peels the coat off so deftly it somehow doesn’t tweak the miserable muscles around the automail port even once.  “There.”  He hangs it on the hook at the end, safely away from all of the dry and not-bloodied clothes dangling off the other ones, and then they’re just… standing there, dripping in Roy Mustang’s foyer.  Goosebumps prickle down Ed’s left arm.  “Right this way,” Roy says before the awkwardness has a chance to set in.  “I think you’ve more than earned a stint in the master bath.”

“I’m gonna leave a blood-ring in your tub,” Ed says as they tromp on up the stairs.

That sounded darkly funny in his head, but it just sounds shitty spoken out.

“Nothing bleach and elbow grease can’t fix,” Roy says.  “Or, failing that, a new bathtub.  Although…” He opens the door to a bedroom; Ed glimpses rumpled white sheets strewn across a wide mattress before his attention is diverted to a borderline-opulent little lavatory.  “I must admit that I’m rather attached to this one.”

Ed doesn’t fucking blame him—the tub he’s got is a giant, gleaming-white, griffon-claw-footed monstrosity straight out one of Ed’s rare but unfortunately real domestic-themed daydreams.

“You’re of course welcome to the shower if you’d prefer,” Roy says, and it’s nearly tempting; the damn granite-tiled cube number he’s got is almost as good.

“Bath is better,” Ed says.  He curls his left hand around the border of the port and tries to circle his shoulder, which is… not the best idea he’s ever had.  “For this, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” Roy says.  “Make yourself at home.  Let me see if I can find you…”

He wanders back out into the bedroom without finishing that sentence, and Ed stands stranded in the middle of the bright, clean tile for a long second.

He’s never had _nice_ things.  He’s never really wanted them.  And it feels fucking weird to be in a _nice_ room, in a _nice_ house, surrounded by fucking _nice_ bathroom fixtures.  He _is_ going to leave a goddamn ring in this tub.  And even if he somehow miraculously doesn’t, his wet footprints are a stain on this floor, and his breath is a blight on this air, and the point is—he doesn’t belong here.  Not in Roy’s space.  Not in Roy’s fucking life.  Everything Roy’s built is deliberate, and delicate, and calculated, and secure.  He’s worked his occasionally distractingly-appealing ass off for it—to make this structure, and hold it, and stabilize it every way he can.

Ed is a fucking natural disaster in motion at the best of times.  He knows that.  Mostly it works for him—mostly he’s getting by despite his tendencies to turn into a cataclysm at the slightest fucking notice, even though he’s trying to keep himself on the straight and narrow now.  He’d bring all this shit down around Roy’s ears inside of a fucking week just by existing.

“Here,” Roy says as he sidles back in.

It’s way too late to pretend to have been doing anything all this time.  Ed’s instinct is to try to lean casually against the bathtub, but the Al voice in his head cordially reminds him that that is a _stupid_ idea that will probably end with wet socks slipping on the tiles, automail cracking the porcelain, and his head splitting open when it hits the side.  He settles on shifting his feet extremely awkwardly and attempting at a tentative smile.

Roy smiles back, like nothing about this is weird.  The fucker.  He then holds out a small stack of folded clothing, like there’s nothing weird about _that_ , either.

“I believe there should be several clean towels under the sink,” he says as Ed cautiously reaches out to accept it.  “Feel free to shout if you need anything—but you might want to make it quick, since momentarily I’ll be using the _other_ shower, and I probably won’t hear you.”

“Typical politician,” Ed says, snatching the clothes away for emphasis.  “Make me promises that don’t mean anything.  I see how it is.”

Roy—

—winks.

Whatever the fuck else Ed was going to say, _ever_ , fucking perishes halfway up his throat and blocks it so fully that he can’t even hope to breathe.

“Really, though,” Roy says.  “Make yourself at home.”

He sweeps out after that, shutting the door behind him—which is good, because the knot prickling upward towards the back of Ed’s mouth might’ve just come out as _Don’t fucking tempt me_ if he couldn’t hold it back.

If nothing else, though, Roy’s bathtub is every bit as fucking incredible in practice as it looked just sitting there being all majestic and shit.  The water heats up in the blink of an eye, so after Ed’s shepherded the sopping weight of his discarded clothing into a mound-pile-thing in the bottom of the shower stall—so that it won’t leave a diluted blood-puddle on the floor—he climbs in and just lets the tap run on top of his shoulder for a little while.  He’s been thinking the best strategy here is to rinse as much of the blood from his skin as he can first, and _then_ put the plug in and soak off the rest.

When he’s accomplished that—with the water as hot as he can fucking bear it—he settles in and slides down until he’s submerged up to the neck.  The ends of his hair saturate and float a little, twirling around in a fascinating fluid-dynamics kind of way.  The water’s gone rosy.  There’s probably a fuckton of blood crusted into the workings of the automail; even if he tries to wash it out daily, Winry’ll find some next time she does maintenance and menace him with the wrench.

That’s all right.

He looks at his knees where just a bit of each protrudes from the surface—one silver, one pale.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it.

When he had time to think, that is—at home, mostly, after all of the important shit was abruptly over.

He hadn’t really figured on surviving.  Not exactly, anyway.  He’d sort of assumed he’d have to give his life for Al’s—that was the only equivalency that made sense, and the only one he’d dared to think was guaranteed.  And he’d been ready for it.  He hadn’t wasted any of the time he had back then thinking about futures he wasn’t sure he was going to get.

After, though… afterwards, he had nothing _but_ fucking time.  No drive, no direction, no purpose, no _meaning_ —just the endless rolling hills of Resembool and the rabbit warrens in his brain.

And he’d wondered, sometimes, what the mark on his arm had looked like.  What it had signified.  Who had the other one.

And he’d wondered, more than once, if it was Roy.

He didn’t think it _was_ —life’s never been about getting what you want, or think you want, or vaguely hope for when it’s just this side of too late to try to go back to sleep.  He just sort of… let himself speculate a little, every now and then, about what might happen if that was the case.

Because they did have something.  They’d always had _something_ ; for a long time, there, it was mostly mistrust and animosity and snarking and shouting and bizarre flashes of grudging respect.  And then there were a lot more of the flashes—so many, after a while, that they stopped being flashes and just started being a constant source of light.

And he’d heard the fucking rumors.  The stories.  The legends; the probable-lies.  He’d heard about how good Roy was at the whole dating gig.  And he knew that Roy was probably fanning those flames deliberately from deep in his silent, lonely little dork den; he knew it was part of the game, and part of the front, and part of the image.  He knew Roy had turned smokescreens into an art form.

But still.

What if—?

What if it _was_ Roy, and somehow, some way, they found out that it was?  He ended up spending a frankly pretty fucking embarrassing quantity of time trying to determine the most plausible course of events that would follow that revelation.

It had occurred to him that Roy might just—reject it.  Refuse it outright.  That Roy might deny the very fucking possibility—and he’d be able to; the Gate had taken all the proof, and he’d be well within his rights to feel sho… shaf… let down.  Ripped off.  Disappointed.  Something like that.  Who the hell would want to soulmate-settle for the likes of _Ed_?

Maybe it says a lot about him that that’d been the first train of thought he hopped on the instant that he gave himself permission to contemplate the thing at all.  It was an obvious enough conclusion, though: some soulmate bullshit can’t make another person _want_ him.  He sold all the things that could have made him wantable for little wisps and slivers of different kinds of power a long time ago.  He doesn’t have much left.  And anybody who got stuck with the other half of his mark would very rationally feel like they’d been dealt a shitty hand, and they’d ask if somebody could shuffle the deck again.

There was a night in Resembool when the gnawing questions and the inability to force his brain to shut down around them sent him creeping down to the living room and paging through all of Pinako’s photograph albums one by one.  He wanted to know—to have a place to start, if not a full fucking reference; the only thing he’s good at is science, and evidence, and logic, and proof.

But there isn’t a single picture of him that survives where you can see more than just the edges of the mark that used to sit on his wrist.

Makes sense, really.  A lot of people—especially a lot of people in the East, in the countryside—treat it as sort of a private thing.  Not really a secret, but… special.  Mom was pretty old-fashioned about it, too; when they were kids, she’d encourage them to—not hide the marks, exactly, but she had a tendency to imply that they should keep them under wraps.  It was easy enough for Al not to flash the skin on his shoulder at everybody and their uncle, but she gave Ed a cool leather bracelet with silver studs on it and always innocently asked him where it was when the weather was too hot for longer sleeves.

Point is—given the cultural traditions back home, it’s really no surprise that there isn’t any visual evidence left of what it looked like.  And given the trajectory of his stupid fucking life, it’s really no surprise that every time he searched for something, he came up empty-handed.

So there’s no way to know, and there was nothing to do but… guess.

He’d always tried to quash that stupid fucking thought with the rational likelihood that Roy probably had his somewhere else completely—just some spot Ed hadn’t happened to have seen, like his ankle, or the back of his neck, or somewhere down along his spine.  Hell, some people who get them in annoying places like their face or whatever just cover them with makeup so they’re not constantly on display; whether or not he and Roy had scraped though some shit together over the years, he’d always firmly reminded himself that there were about a thousand places it could be.

Until yesterday.

Until now.

But the thing is—

It’s still not fucking _guaranteed_.

Mathematically speaking, there have to be a statistically significant number of people whose marks ended up on their wrists.  Within the sample size of the entire fucking human race, there will necessarily be a metric shit-ton of individuals whose marks turn up on that particular two-inch span of skin.  It’s inevitable.  That much is a foregone conclusion.  Certainty is out of the fucking question unless Pinako’s got a stash of photos buried somewhere Ed couldn’t find—or maybe if he dances slow and sultry with death another time or twelve, and he winds up at the Gate again, and he asks real fucking nicely if he can look at the limb the Truth’s still hanging onto, just for reference, y’know—

The point is, he had a lot of good fucking reasons for trying not to let himself wonder too much.

But some nights they weren’t enough.

Some nights he couldn’t stop himself from thinking—

What would Roy do if it _was_?

What would he be like?  What the hell are you even supposed to do with a… what?  Destiny-boyfriend?  Ed’s never seen it from the start before; he’s only glimpsed it well-established a couple times, and it’s a totally different fucking thing to have to figure out a way to _be_ with someone.  Is there some kind of immortal-soul lifetime guarantee that things won’t just explode in your fucking face?  Does the magic of the marks somehow compel you to be compatible?

Or is it in you all along, and you’re tasked with digging it out without slamming your shovel into a landmine buried somewhere nearby?

It all just seems so fucking—fraught, and fake, and complicated.  Exaggerated.  Like maybe none of them really _do_ match; like maybe it’s all fucking invented by the first person who realized they could sell matchmaking services at an unbelievable profit; like maybe there’s just no such goddamn thing, and they’ve all been running around straining to see other people’s ink for no damn reason.

But if… _If_.

What would Roy be like?  How would he approach the role of destiny-boyfriend if he was fated for it after all?

Would he—just sort of—treat it like a normal-boyfriend thing?  Just… suggest a place to have a first date, go for the wine and dine, spew some clichéd compliments, drag them out on a long walk through the city in places cold enough to lend a jacket and clear enough to see the stars?

All Ed has to go on for how he _acts_ in those situations is the rumor consensus that he’s pretty great in the sack—which makes sense, when you think about it, because he’s extremely responsive to other people’s emotional cues, and he’s intuitive as fuck even when that fails.

So logically—logic is the principle at work here for this whole thing, after all; logic is the basic set of rules on which the rest of Ed’s conclusions are predicated—it’d be pretty safe to assume that Roy would be… wonderful.  Actually.  Fucking miraculous, even.  It’d be pretty safe to assume that, if Roy lets you inside the chain-link fences and the battlement walls and the moat and the alligators and whatever decorative-looking traps he’s got set up past there—if he decides you’re worth risking safety for; if he isn’t scared of showing you the real shit underneath the showmanship—he’d be an incredible… soulmate.  Lover.  Destiny-boyfriend.  Whatthefuckever.  All or any of the above.

But logic is still in charge here.  And logically, Ed’s not entitled to jackshit yet—or ever.  Entitlement’s what’ll kill you.  Thinking the universe owes you a damn thing instantly ensures that it’s going to pull the rug out from under you when you least expect it, then kick you in the kidneys while you’re lying on the hardwood clutching at whatever hurts the most.

All he’s got to go on is a slight statistical possibility.  All he’s got is a white mark on Roy’s wrist that he’s relatively sure shares some spatial features with the one he used to have—the one that’s gone, long gone, and never coming back.

Does it even count anymore?

If you don’t have the thing on your skin, does the phenomenon persist somewhere in you?  It’s not a skinmate, after all; it’s a _soulmate_ , so presumably it’s tied to something much more nebulous than a wrist or a hand or an arm or Jean Havoc’s butt cheek, and damage to the physical manifestation doesn’t negate the metaphysical part of it.  The connective element of… whatever it is… should persist regardless of the condition of…

He tilts his head back and slides carefully along the tub until most his hair and both of his ears are submerged, and all he can hear is the deadened sloshing of the water against the sides.  None of this really matters.  None of this is what he’s here for.  He’s just taking a break here so he can get back to Al, and then they can both get back to helping people and making their little corner of the world a tiny bit better for everyone they can.  That’s it.  That’s the point.  His feelings—his daydreams, and night dreams, and yearnings—don’t factor in.  They don’t _matter_.  That’s not what any of it is about.

And imagining how Roy’s hands would feel on his shoulder and his throat and his collarbones—

Considering how well Roy must fucking kiss if all the secretaries want so damn badly to get with him—

That doesn’t help.  That’s a waste of time.  That’s a distraction from all the shit he’s supposed to focus on and do.

It’s pretty simple laid out like that, right?

He’ll just… finish washing up and get the fuck out of here.  Easy.  He’ll think intently about Asclepius while he does, because Asclepius is distinctly un-sexy in pretty much every capacity except if you’re _really_ into intellect—and even Ed’s penchant for a good brain doesn’t go that far.

Using Roy’s fucking soap and shampoo doesn’t exactly help, though—some part of Ed’s instinctual person-memory has retained the fact that it’s part of how Roy smells.  Putting his fucking clothes on is even worse, and rolling up the cuffs on the sleeves and the legs grinds a nice little heap of salt into that particular wound, on top of which Roy Mustang elected to offer him, as part of this sartorial loan, _a pair of Roy Mustang’s own underwear_ , and Ed’s head is so woozy and weird right now that he honestly doesn’t know how to deal with any of this fucking shit.  Today has been long and horrible and fucking surreal, and the exhaustion’s crept up on him like fucking Pride with the shadows and the murder, and…

And he’s just going to lie down on the foot of Roy’s bed for thirty seconds or so while he tries to figure out whether he should reassess his decision that wearing Roy’s boxers, which are intended to cradle all of the awkward bits, would prove less awkward in the long run than going commando and dangling the bits all over the inside of Roy’s trousers, which are _not_ intended for that purpose.

Just thirty seconds—half a minute with his eyes closed.  That’s all.  That can’t possibly be too much to ask.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As an apology for how dark this chapter starts ~~and how poorly I edited it~~ , I'm going to tell you a secret: I wrote pierogi into this chapter because I wanted them at the time, and then, completely unbeknownst to me, Mr. Tierfal's mom mailed us some for our six-month anniversary. _Use this power wisely_.
> 
> Also… please don't say the S-word. X'D Sequels happen when and if I get inspired at random, and I really, truly cannot make them appear even if I want to. Until further notice, this is it! The end!
> 
> Thank you for reading. ♥

It’s a dark room—is it even a room?  Maybe it’s just… a place; maybe it’s just the _world_ ; maybe the whole universe is shadow, when you think about it, and it’s all anyone can do to project a spotlight into it somewhere, and it won’t hold out forever, but don’t you have to _try_?

There’s a wet rasp behind him.  Not a breath—not quite.  More like the sound you’d make to emulate breathing if you knew what it was like, but you couldn’t really do it anymore.  More like the sound you’d make pretending to breathe if your ribs had punctured both your lungs, and your throat was full of blood.

Ed turns.

There’s a huge, jagged fragment missing from the top left side of Erik’s skull.  A couple straggling sections of his hair have matted into the blood and caught along the edges of the bone.

“Not good enough,” he chokes out—blood spills from his mouth; there’s so much of it he shouldn’t be able to speak at all around it, but somehow— “Not _good_ enough.  Tell you what, I’ll give you a piece of my mind—”

He reaches up and touches the tips of his long, cracked fingernails to the meat of his—

No, no, oh, _God_ , no—

Ed turns on his heel, stumbling as the automail slides in—something, and—

There’s a little girl.

No.  Not a little girl.  A dog—a big dog, huddled smaller, with a long snout and its ears low.  A dog with stark white hair and ruby red eyes.

“They’re—all—dead,” she says.  “Every… one.  Mine.  And yours.  Everyone—you—love—is dying—Big Brother—”

He can’t; he won’t; he knows it’s not—he _can’t_ —

He turns again; how did three hundred and sixty degrees get to be so fucking claustrophobic?  There’s nowhere—

Erik’s weight falls against him; Erik’s arms sling around his neck, and the fingers scrabble and twist into his hair, and everything is _wet_ —the blood’s so thick; it’s not just fucking plasma; there’s chunks of flesh and tissue in it—globs and clots and lumps so dark red they look black—

“I’m sorry,” Ed fights out, writhing, shoving; the panic freezes his guts, climbing in his chest; the frost is strangling him—he has to get out of here, has to get out of _this_ — “I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ , I—”

The light shifts; the contours of the world jitter and resettle, and the arms dragging at him are soft and…

Are—

Sheets.

It’s a bed.  He’s on a bed.  The room’s dark, but there’s a streetlamp outside somewhere; he’s curled up on the end of the mattress, but somebody folded the blankets across to cover him.

Right.  ‘Somebody’; like hell was it _‘somebody’_ —it was Roy.  This is Roy’s fucking bed in Roy’s fucking house.  He’s wearing Roy’s fucking _clothes_.

Which is still weird.

But he doesn’t really have time to dwell on that, not that it’d matter anyway, because he told Al he was gonna be home for dinner, and it’s dark already, and _fuck_ —

He’s up, and his knees quaver a little but then hold, and after a second he focuses past the ragged edge on his own breathing for long enough to listen to the rain pattering on the roof. He figured it was probably still coming down out there; his ports haven’t stopped aching, for one thing. Means he’ll either have to talk Roy into driving him home, or walk in the fucking rain while wearing the bastard’s too-big clothes.

He stands as still as he can with the last few shivers rattling up and down his spine, breathing as deeply as he can.  He pushes his left hand through his hair and tugs a little at the sleeves of Roy’s shirt.  One of them sort of unrolled on him while he was thrashing around, so he pushes it back into place.  He squares his shoulders, and sets his jaw, and starts out of the room to go look for the owner of all of this shit.

When he gets to the top landing of the staircase, he can see down through the foyer that there’s a light on in the kitchen.  There’s also a _smell_ on in the kitchen, which makes his body suddenly and acutely aware that he hasn’t eaten fucking anything since the bagel Al pilfered for him this morning.

Doesn’t matter, though.  He needs to get home.  Besides—what kind of a shitty surprise guest shows up to someone’s house, leaves blood all over their bathtub, wears their clothes, _and_ eats all their food?  His mother raised him fucking better.

He creeps down the stairs—more because he’s trying to be careful of his miserable fucking leg than because he’s worried about making noise, but there’s a bit of that, too.  He’s imposing so much at this point that it sort of makes him want to be… unobtrusive or something.  As much as possible.

He puts his head into the kitchen and knocks his softer set of knuckles against the doorframe.

The latter gets Roy’s attention, but the former was a mistake.  The kitchen’s just as fucking almost-too-opulent as the bathroom; there are shiny granite surfaces and pretty utensils and _nice stuff_ everywhere.  Ed simultaneously wants to run for the hills and stay here forever.  It’s all just… gorgeous.

Roy most of fucking all.

The _bastard_.

Worse now because he’s… smiling.  Gently.

“Did you sleep all right?” Roy asks.  “It looked like you needed it.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  To one of those parts; whatever.  “You—can I use your phone?”

He’s not looking at the skillet on the stove.  He’s not looking at the little streams of silver steam curling upward from the little dumpling-looking, pillow-shaped things frying merrily away.  He’s not looking at the vegetables simmering next to that; he’s not thinking in excruciating detail about how both would taste and letting his mouth water; he’s not…

Wondering what it’d be like to sit down at the table and eat dinner with Roy.  Like they were close—like they were comfortable.

Roy’s got his own fucking sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and his stupid-gorgeous hands and his stupid-gorgeous forearms and that stupid-gorgeous _wrist_ with the white mark smack-dab in the fucking middle are shamelessly out on display.

“Of course,” Roy says.  He gestures with his elbow; there’s butter on his hands—on his fingertips, slick and gleaming.   _Fuck_.  “It’s on the table in the hall just to your right.”

Ed swings around the corner, blinking hard to try to get his eyes to adjust back to the dimness of the hallway so that he c—

“But if you’re planning on calling Alphonse,” Roy says idly, “I already took the liberty of filling him in.”

Ed pauses.

He reprises his position hanging on the doorframe.

He adds a glare this time.

“Oh, yeah?” he says.  “You assign yourself any other liberties while you were at it?”

“I felt entitled to the liberty of putting Maria Ross on the investigation of the fire,” Roy says without looking up from the food.  He uses a spatula to flip one of the pillow-dumplings.  It’s got a beautiful golden-brown sear on it.  Ed is _so hungry_.  “I trust her to be both fair and thorough.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, only a little bit grudgingly, which he thinks is an accomplishment.  “Good call.”

Roy looks up this time—and fucking smiles again.  Just a little, with his eyes all soft-warm and deep and everything.

“You’re welcome to stand,” he says, “but it would probably be easier to shovel the food into your mouth if you’re sitting.”

“I don’t ‘shovel’,” Ed says stupidly, because if he thinks too much about—if he lets himself process the fact that Roy Mustang apparently just fucking made dinner for him, or for them, or _whatever_ —his brain’ll up and quit.  “I… convey food maybe a little faster than strictly necessary, or some… shit.”

“I will confess I’ve never seen you actually eat with a spade,” Roy says.  He’s depositing the beautiful pillow-dumplings on plates now.  Oh, fuck.  It’s too late; Ed’s staying for dinner.  Ed’s staying and having dinner with Roy, in Roy’s house, while wearing Roy’s clothes, and a part of him is screaming that he should _run_.  “But just because I’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it’s never happened.”

Ed bares his teeth.  “When I said I was born in a fucking barn, I was being _sarcastic_.  Or was that conversation just too quick for you to follow?”

“I would say something about proportions and agility and your resulting evasiveness,” Roy says, picking up not one, but two plates Ed would consider giving the other arm for and carrying them over to the table; “but I don’t want to get a spade in my eye.  Come and sit.”

Growling would not help Ed’s case, so he makes a face instead.  “You miss the memo that I’m not your damn dog anymore?”

“Hardly,” Roy says.  He draws a chair out, leaves it, draws out the one across, and sits down.  “Allow me to rephrase that: _please_ come and sit?  Your brother made me promise that I’d feed you.”

That’s pretty plausible, actually.  Al worries about that kind of shit.  Hence the bagel and all.

Equally pertinent, when was the last time Roy Mustang asked him—or anyone—nicely for something?

Well—probably the last time he wanted somebody to pass the salt when they were all having fries at the stupid pub, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Ed can’t stop his hands from uncurling and releasing the damn doorframe at last, and he can’t stop his feet from moving, and he can’t…

Well, shit.  Whatever.  He needs to eat something one way or another—might as well be this, and might as well be here.

He sits down.

He picks up the fork.

Roy smiles a little more, with only a subtle trace of smug bastardliness, and the food smells so fucking good that Ed’s just going to let that one pass.

He carves a bite off of one of the pillow-dumplings with the side of his fork.  Once the beautiful wisp of steam clears, the contents look like… mashed potato and heaven.

When he puts it in his mouth—a little too soon; it burns the roof of his mouth on contact, but he doesn’t have any spare fucks lying around to spend on caring—it also _tastes_ like mashed potato and heaven.

“Have you not had pierogi before?” Roy asks.  “They’re wonderful.”

“No _shit_ ,” Ed says, hacking away to try to get a second bite that’s twice as big.

Roy laughs—softly, lightly, lowly—and picks up his own damn fork.

“Enjoy,” he says.

“I ff’cking will,” Ed says through a mouthful.

  


* * *

  


The eating part is easy initially, while he’s too starved and grateful to pause for conversation or any of that crap.  It’s when he cleans the plate and pauses that the problems start.

One problem, anyway: the Roy problem.

It’s a good thing Ed has pretty much no interest in being overly honest with himself or anyone else; if he did, he’d have to admit that he’s had the Roy problem for a lot longer than he’d like to think about.  The bastard was on to something—like the bastard often is when he turns on that frighteningly apt awareness of other people’s motivations and emotions and inner lives.  Ed has fucking felt it, too.  They’re linked.  Nobody can prove it’s a soulmate thing; nobody can prove it’s even _real_ , but he knows it.  Roy knows it.  Even when they’re halfway across the country from each other—even when he’s trying his absolute fucking hardest not to care—

He sets the fork down as gently as he can so it won’t fucking clatter.

“You were going to say something,” he says.  “Back at… before the whole thing.”

Roy’s barely even eating.  He’s consumed a little bit of heaven-food, but mostly he just seems to be picking at it and kind of moving it around.  Which is a _crime_ given how good it is, but if Ed takes him to task for it, Roy will let it distract them both from the real issue, and he’ll use that to weasel his way out.

Or maybe he doesn’t even need an excuse.  The fucking bastard just blinked at Ed twice and then closed his whole face off—like dropping a wall; like whipping the curtains shut; like wiping the marks off of a chalkboard and leaving nothing but the gray slate behind.

“Was I?” he says.  He stands from the table, collects Ed’s plate and lays his own on top of it— “I don’t remember.”

Like _hell_ he doesn’t.  Like fucking _hell_ —

This is the same old shit as before—as in the good old days, when Roy used to parcel out just as much information as he _wanted_ Ed to have and not a fucking morsel more.  This is the same old fucking tactic; he gives on _his_ terms, and then he reconsiders, and then he plays fucking stupid like Ed’s some military asshole who believes for a second that Roy Mustang doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing all the fucking time—

Roy starts rinsing the dishes and putting them in the sink.  Ed gets up, and curls his hands slowly into fists at his sides.

“You were talking about how we’ve got a connection,” he says.  “I kinda wanted to hear the rest of that.”

Fucking primly, Roy dries his hands on a little towel hanging next to the stove.  He doesn’t look at Ed, which is a dead fucking giveaway, and they both know it.  “I can’t recall what I was going to say next.”

“You don’t think I’m that stupid,” Ed says.  “Which makes it pretty fucking insulting that you’re trying this shit anyway.”

That gets a rise out of the bastard—Roy’s whole back tightens, and he plants both hands on the counter and turns enough to look over his left shoulder at Ed.

“After everything that happened today,” he says, “I don’t think this is the time or the place to discuss it.”

“Tough shit,” Ed says.

Roy turns.  And then he pauses long enough to swallow once, audibly, which—by the standards of the Sneaky Bastard Extraordinaire—is practically like a fucking scream.  If you know him like Ed does, you can see it in his eyes that he’s processing as fast as he can—calculating what he’s going to say.

“Please,” is what he ends up saying.  “Another time.  Another place.  We’re both upset; we’re both—”

“Fuck that,” Ed says.  “I’m basically always upset, as you’re well-fucking-aware.”

Roy’s mouth twitches towards a smile, and then he irons it out into a flat, unrevealing line.  “Still—”

“What were you gonna say?” Ed asks.

“It should wait,” Roy says.  “We can talk about this when we aren’t both worked up about—”

“Let’s fucking talk about it now,” Ed says, crossing half the span of kitchen floor laid out between them.  “I don’t get your undivided attention too much.  Don’t give me any bullshit, and I won’t give you any back.”

Roy looks at him for a long, long couple of seconds—long enough that Ed’s guts start to writhe a little, and the unsettlement wants to ripple through him and make him squirm.

But he can’t.  He can’t lose ground now.  He’s finally got Roy on the fucking ropes.

“Well?” he says.  “You started this, Mustang.  Are you gonna finish it?”

Roy takes two steps towards him, and then two more.  Ed’s heart beats—a tempo too quick to dance to; too fast to gauge and too heavy to stop; he’s _momentum_ straight through.

Roy takes one more step.  There’s about a foot and a half of tiled kitchen flooring left before their bodies collide.

If neither of them moves, that is.  And neither of them will.

“You have always had,” Roy says, “so many things you had to do—good things, _important_ things.  You’ve always had a mission, and a direction, and a reason to be.  A reason to be who you are; to be doing what you’re doing.  And the last thing I want—the last thing I’d _ever_ want—is to slow you down.  To drag you backwards and distract you from that.”

He takes one more step.

“You’re going to do great things, Ed,” he says.  “You’re already doing them; you’ve already _done_ more than most people can dream of.  And I have been selfish enough times in my life to know when to stop.”

Words keep swelling in Ed’s throat until they’re too big to breathe past, let alone to speak.  He tries to swallow, tries to clear them, tries to choke some out, but Roy’s eyes are focused and sincere, and that is _fucking_ with his head.

“Mustang,” he says.

No.  He’s better than that.

“ _Roy_ ,” he says.  “You ever think that that’s exactly the same fucking spiel that I would’ve given you?  All this life’s work shit, and me being a drain on it, and the whole thing being unbalanced and all that shit?”  He realizes that the sentence is true as he gives voice to it: “It’s the same damn story.  And that’s the only reason we haven’t…”

They haven’t what?

Pretended like they both believe in fairy tales long enough to see if this one’s true?

“You asked me a question,” Roy says.  “By the house.  One question, full honesty.”  He tilts his head, just slightly, and it changes the cast of the tiny shadow of his eyelashes on his cheeks.  “Do I get an equivalent exchange?”

“Maybe,” Ed says.

Roy takes another half a step.

He’s so close.  He’s so close; Ed can smell his sweat, his skin, the last of the fucking blood—

He’s so warm.  And somehow his eyes are midnight-fucking-black and still so _bright_.

“Where did your mark used to be?” Roy asks.

There it is.

There it fucking is, and Ed feels like he’s on the end of a goddamn cliff—

He swallows, a little too hard.  “Why’d you waste your fucking question with one you know the answer to?”

The corners of Roy’s mouth curl upward just slightly.  “I want to hear you say it.”

Ed’s heart pounds, and shudders, and just keeps going.  “You think I give two shits about what you want?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “Possibly three.”

Something in Ed is shaking so violently he can’t believe he hasn’t cracked a rib.  “Shows what you fuckin’ know.”

Roy’s throat works.  His skin is so fucking—Ed hates cows, hates milk, hates everything dairy fucking stands for; but just this once, the pale-cream color of Roy’s fucking skin—

“I know…” Roy says, and he lifts his stupid fucking right hand, and Ed’s frozen _solid_ and can’t dodge out of the way as he sets just the very, very tips of his fingers against Ed’s jaw—so light it’s almost more of a tingle than a touch; so light that it doesn’t seem _real_ — “…that marks are not as important as people make them out to be.”

Ed sort of wants to bite him.  Just—anywhere.  In general.  A pulse-quickening inclination, slowly solidifying into a concrete fucking desire.  He wants to bite fucking Roy.

That’s probably a bad sign.

Either he’s a cannibal, or he’s holding back an avalanche of fucking affection here, and he’s not sure which one’s worse.

“Easy for you to say,” he manages.

“They’re not a universal law,” Roy says.  “They don’t define us, and they don’t control us, and they don’t make us who we are.  You can fall in love with someone who doesn’t match with you.  And you can fall in love with someone without ever knowing if they do.”

His fingertips are still resting against Ed’s jawline.  They shift to graze his cheek, and fucking _lightning_ runs through Ed’s veins, and how do people live like this?  How does anyone get anything _done_?

“I’ve done both now,” Roy says.  “The marks don’t matter, Ed.  Having yours wouldn’t change you.  And nothing about you needs to be changed.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says, but his stupid voice shakes.

“I’m still being honest,” Roy says.  His fingertips skate down, settle under Ed’s chin, tilt his head up just a fraction— “Are you?”

Ed swallows, and then his mouth’s so fucking dry he has to swipe his tongue across his lip, and that—

Drags the worst and most gorgeous fucking little half-caught breath out of Roy.

Ed has to say something.  He has to say something brilliant and cutting and clever enough to fix all of this.

What comes out of his mouth is “Try me.”

“Gladly,” Roy says, and there’s a hint of a fucking purr in it, and Ed’s right knee isn’t working properly.  “Where was your mark?”

More than just his voice is shaking now. Fucking everything is.  “You know,” he says, “exactly where it fucking was.”

“I have a theory,” Roy says.

The hand flirting with Ed’s throat stays there, and the other one—

Latches onto Ed’s automail arm and draws it up to eye level, so that Ed can fucking _watch_ Roy lean over and brush his lips across the steel in the very center of Ed’s wrist.

Roy’s breath mists on the metal.  And the whole thing, Ed’s whole forearm and the hand and all of it, looks so fucking—good with Roy’s mouth hovering over it in a way he has to describe as _loving_ —it looks so fucking normal, so fucking nice—

“Bastard,” Ed gasps out.

“I’ve never once denied it,” Roy says.

Ed’s whole heart is just—pieces.  Just a spill of fragments like shattered glass, sticking in his throat.  “Would you just fucking kiss me?”

Roy graces him with a smirk that could end entire worlds.

“I would love to,” the bastard says.

“So do it,” Ed says.

And he does.

  


* * *

  


Kissing Roy is great.  It’s fucking— _amazing_ , actually; it’s…

Kissing Roy while staggering backwards towards and up the stairs is also great, right up until the point where the constant pulse of low-grade pain rather abruptly transitions into a dozen spears of high-grade pain, and the sudden intrusion of it makes Ed startle, lose his footing, slip, and land on his ass on the next step.

Roy goes halfway down with him and ends up leaning over him, blinking, arms still looped around him.

“Are you all right?” Roy asks immediately, and his hands sort of flutter around Ed’s limbs, like they’re checking for injuries, rather than trying to haul him back up to his feet.

“Yeah,” Ed says, trying to shake his head to clear the last of the little yellow star-dots bursting in his field of vision.  “Just this fucking…” He raps his knuckles on the edge of the automail port on his thigh.  “With the rain.”

Roy looks down at the progress of Ed’s hand, then up at his face, and then smiles, arching an eyebrow.

“May I have the unparalleled honor,” he says, “of introducing you to the art of the sensual massage?”

That sends Ed’s heart ricocheting right up into his throat again.  Which is fine, because it’s closer that way to the blood that just rushed into his face.  That must be a more efficient use of his circulatory system all around.

“Um,” he says.  “Y—yeah.  Uh—sure.”

It’s not like he figured they were stumbling up the stairs joined at the mouth so that they could play pinochle or some shit—he was aware that this was a prelude to sexual activity of some kind, although admittedly he was a little distracted trying to focus on the kissing part.  Partly he was deliberately focusing on the kissing part, because he doesn’t actually know what the sex part is supposed to be like, and not knowing shit puts him on edge, and the last thing he wants is to be sharp enough at the corners to cut Roy’s fingertips right now.

Roy’s other eyebrow darts up to join its brother, and he should look stupid like that, but instead he looks cute.  There is no fucking hope for Ed at this point.  All is lost.  Irrevocably.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t enthusiastically want to,” Roy says.  He touches his forehead to Ed’s, closing his eyes like he’s savoring the feeling of it, and runs a couple of fingers through the damp tangles of Ed’s hair.  “In fact, I really don’t have any interest in doing anything you aren’t enthusiastic about.”  His eyelids rise, just slightly, and the slow fucking burn in his eyes leaches all the moisture out of Ed’s mouth again.  “That being said, some introductions to a few things you haven’t experienced before might give you reason for enthusiasm.”

Ed doesn’t know exactly what that’s going to entail.

But he knows he fucking likes the sound of it.

It’s not the sex part—not the intimacy part, not the bare skin and barer feelings—that he’s afraid of.

It’s not knowing.  It’s not knowing what he’s in for, what it’ll be like, what he’s getting into—not knowing if agreeing to something that seems all right means signing up for a later part that _isn’t_ , or… what.

But this is Roy.  This is Roy, and Roy’s smarter than that; Roy knows him, and knows how his fucking head works.

Roy’s his fucking soulmate, apparently.

That’s got to count for something.

He takes a breath and lets it out slow.

“I’ll try anything once,” he says.

Roy smiles, stands up, and offers both of his hands.  “I thought you might say that.”

A part of Ed’s brain wants to hesitate, but his body doesn’t listen.  He reaches out and grabs on, and Roy helps him up.

“If you start doing cutesy trying-to-finish-my-sentences shit,” he says, “I’m gonna call this whole thing off and then kick your ass so hard you get a new mark, in the shape of my foot.”

“Maybe that’s what Jean’s looks like,” Roy says mildly.

Ed trips, and only Roy’s grip on his hands prevents him from doing a fucking header on the next stair up.

“Sorry,” Roy says.

“I can’t believe this,” Ed says.  “In one day I have to come to terms with all this soulmate shit _and_ with you having a sense of humor.”

“The fact that you chose not to notice it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have it,” Roy says.  “Perhaps it went over your head.”

Ed stares at him.

Roy stares back.

“If you’re trying to get laid here,” Ed says, “you are doing a _shitty_ job.”

And Roy—

Laughs.  Low and long and rich, like he fucking means it.

One way or another, Ed survives the rest of the staircase, but in the doorway to the bastard’s bedroom, both of them pause.

This unison shit has seriously got to stop.  If this is part of the soulmate deal, Ed’s going to quit.

He hasn’t worked out exactly how yet.  Hopefully it won’t come to that, because Roy’ll stop trying to read his fucking mind and _succeeding_.

“Ed,” Roy says, softly, “are you sure you want to do this?”

Shit.  So much for that.

“I—” he says.

And then he makes himself—think about it.

He wants fucking Roy—that much he’s painstakingly clear on; that much is written on the insides of his ribs, and his heart keeps hitting it so hard the ink’s imprinted.

Whether he wants Roy _fucking_ is a little bit… murkier.

Roy’s hands—palms, knuckles, fingertips—against his skin have felt… pretty fucking great so far.

Roy’s mouth has, too.  Evidently he can do some pretty amazing things with that mouth.

But the rest of it…

“How about this?” Roy asks while he stands there, tongue-tied and so tense that he’s making all the aching worse.  Roy’s hand sweeps up his left arm, feather-light, and then brushes his hair back out of his eyes.  “Let me see what I can do about the automail, and then we can play it by ear from there.”

“I’m tone-deaf,” Ed says.  Which is a stupid thing to say, probably, but nonetheless fucking true.

Roy smiles.

And then Roy fucking kisses him again, and he lets his eyes slide shut, and the world fades to a sort of sweet, undifferentiated dark.

“Good,” Roy murmurs against his mouth.  “I can’t sing.”

Ed draws back enough to open his eyes and assess the quality of Roy’s grin.  It’s a pretty good one, all told.

“Okay,” he says.  He grabs at Roy’s sleeve.  Reaching for the bastard’s hand would still be… weird.  Touchy-feely.  Too-real.  _Cute_.  “Impress me.”

“Yes, sir,” Roy says, and catches his collar—his borrowed collar, that is; the collar of his borrowed shirt, because who even wears…?—and draws him across the threshold, across the carpet, to the bed.

Ed wants to eyeball the bed—not because he thinks it’ll have changed shape in the hour he’s been away from it, or something, but if he doesn’t register the suspicion, it’ll have to come out somehow.  Problem is Roy’s too mesmerizing to look away from, and he’s leaning in again—

And kissing Ed all soft and tender and nice and shit, and that’s just… disarming.  Is what it is.  Bastard probably knows exactly what he’s doing.

“Relax,” Roy whispers into the inch he puts between them by drawing back just far enough to meet Ed’s eyes.  He fans his hands on Ed’s chest and drags them down the shirt just a little.  “May I take this?”

“It’s your shirt,” Ed manages.  “You can do whatever the fuck you want with it.”

Roy’s smile tilts—weird.  Weirdly sort of… rueful.  Or some stupid romance novel word like that.

“You’re wearing it,” he says.  “Original ownership aside, as long as you are wearing it, it is, de facto, yours.  And you’re in control of its fate.”

Ed gives him a sardonic look.  Which is a little more difficult when you’re two inches from somebody’s nose, but he hasn’t exactly backed down from a challenge yet.

Roy’s trying not to laugh again.  He’s awfully fucking giggly tonight.  He then tries to sniff disapprovingly for good measure.  “Don’t look at me like that.  I thought it was very clever.”

“You would,” Ed says.

Roy smoothes the lapels of the shirt, and even through the layer of fabric, his hands just feel… fucking transcendent, really.  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then, which is perfectly all r—”

“As the de facto fate-decider of this shirt,” Ed says, “or whatever the fuck it was, I’ll thank you not to put words in my mouth, Mustang.”

Bastard’s eyes gleam.  “I can think of other things I’d much rather…” He pauses.  “Sorry, that was a bit—”

Ed heaves an overstated sigh loud enough to drown him out and unbuttons the stupid borrowed shirt—at least it’s got bigger buttons than the ones Al likes; at least his fingertips can tremble a little and still make contact and pull them free.  Then he rolls his shoulders to shrug it off, which hurts like a bitch on the right side but is absolutely fucking _worth_ it for the way Roy’s breath catches, and his pupils dilate.

“That looked wonderful on you,” Roy says, and his voice is slightly strained, and his eyes are tracking slowly and intently over all the scars and lines and contours of Ed’s chest, “but I must confess that I like it even better on the floor.”

There’s a lot of it to fucking look at right now—apparently Roy’s just got more body mass than he does, because the waist of the loan-pants has gradually and inescapably crept down to hang precariously from the very edges of Ed’s hips.  It’s honestly possible that if his left thigh wasn’t a little swollen from the automail problem, these pants would _also_ be on the fucking floor.

Roy’s gaze lingers on the nasty snarl low on Ed’s stomach where the fucking pole went through—it’s a big, jagged, obtrusive fucking thing, pearly pink shot through with angry red veins like severed vines trying to take root.

“That’s interesting,” Roy says.  And he’s undoing _his_ shirt now, in a fucking hurry at that, and Ed’s heart takes up residence in the back of his mouth, possibly in an attempt to attract air that he can offer to his extremely empty lungs.  Roy peels the thing off like he’s a professional fucking stripper, which—given his upbringing—is less far-fetched than it sounds at first.

And then he gestures to the equally obtrusive tangle of knitting scars on his own abdomen.

“We match,” he says.

They’re not identical, obviously; not even close.

But still—isn’t it a little bit strange?  Isn’t it a little bit _convenient_ , a little bit too unlikely to be a product of ordinary chance?

Isn’t it a little bit weird that they both have an uncommon mark in the same damn place after all?

Ed’s not going to think about it too much.  He’s still got a couple other things pending on the agenda, as it happens.

Well, one.

Which is _Do Roy_.

Which he needs to handle before he lets himself get distracted with any of this other shit.

He shifts his weight back to move into what might be characterized as a defensive stance—about the best one he can get to without actually moving his feet.  He wouldn’t put it past fucking Mustang to think it was sexy to pick him up and toss him onto the bed, which is a little touch of foreplay that is only ever going to take place over his dead body.

“So,” he says in the meantime.  “You gonna wow me, or what?”

Fortunately for Roy’s hands, they don’t even twitch toward a part of Ed that would make a good leverage point for hurling him onto the mattress. That’s a good thing. That means Roy gets to keep them.

“I am certainly,” Roy says, “going to try.”  He sweeps one of those hands sideways in an encouragingly not-grabby way.  “Would you like to lie down?”

Questions that aren’t actually questions but are, in fact, carefully-worded commands generally drive Ed up the fucking wall, but he’s trying to stay open-minded here, so he only hesitates for a second before he clambers up—cautious of his stupid fucking automail on both fronts—and flops down on his front on the bed.  “S’this okay?”

“Perfect,” Roy says, and Ed doubts that, but he doesn’t get a chance to comment—Roy climbs up with him, and he _forces_ himself to stay still instead of tensing, and then Roy hikes a leg over him and plants one knee on either side of his waist.  “Is that all right?”

The upshot is that Roy will not be able to see Ed blushing with the approximate heat and coloration of a forest fire.  “Uh—fine.”

“Good,” Roy murmurs, and the way his voice fucking rumbles from the center of his chest when he lowers it like that is just—

Another natural disaster.  Is what it is.  Possibly a fucking tidal wave, and Ed’s not sure whether this fire is going to hold out.

Roy’s obnoxiously attractive hands—which are still attractive when Ed can’t see them, because they _feel_ attractive; in related news, he’s beginning to wonder if he hit his head hard enough at some point today that he immediately forgot about it and also damaged something—very gently shepherd his still-damp hair off of his neck and collect it on the left side, clear of all the metal.  Roy’s obnoxiously attractive hands then spread themselves on the bed on either side of Ed’s head, which seems confusingly counterproductive for a second until Roy bends down and kisses the nape of Ed’s neck, then breathes slowly and deliberately down along his entire spine.

Ed wants to say something scathingly witty, but when he parts his lips, what comes out is “ _Oh_.”

“If I do anything you don’t like,” Roy says, and his open hands slide slowly over the curve of Ed’s lower back and up from there, one on either side of his spine, and goosebumps flood down Ed’s left arm despite the way he bites his lip, “I’m trusting you to tell me.  Anything at all.  It doesn’t imply anything, and it won’t affect anything except that I’ll put that off-limits and find something better.  Is that fair?”

There’s no such thing as fair.

But it sure as fucking hell—

“Sounds good,” Ed manages.

“Lovely,” Roy says, and the word alone is warm and soothing on Ed’s skin; when Roy’s thumbs follow it, pressing in—gently at first and then progressively harder all the way up—on either side of his spinal cord, tracing it upwards until they reach the base of his skull—

Shit.

He gets one good breath in before the pads of Roy’s thumbs dig into the tendons on the sides of his neck, and holy _fucking_ hell—

“Do you get a lot of headaches?” Roy asks—in an idle-conversation voice, rather than a straddling-your-soulmate-on-a-bed voice, apparently because sadistic bastards don’t change their stripes overnight.  “You’re carrying a lot of tension here.”

“It’s not tension,” Ed grinds out.  “It’s bullshit.”

“In your case,” Roy says, “I think it amounts to the same thing.”

“I guess,” Ed says.  His bantering skills aren’t exactly top-notch to start with, and it’s a mite fucking tougher when you’re being pinned on a mattress in an extremely suggestive fashion by the weight of your extremely hot destiny-boyfriend.  His extremely hot destiny-boyfriend’s extremely clever hands press in against a pair of matching sore spots on both sides of his jaw.  “ _Ow_.”

Roy pauses.  “Is that a good ‘ow’ or a bad ‘ow’?”

Ed turns just enough to get a bit of a sightline on him, the better to raise an eyebrow.  “Aren’t massages always kinda both?”

“That…” Roy grins.  What a fucking asshole; he’s all ruffle-haired and shirtless and flushed through the cheekbones already, with cords standing out on his forearms where his hands are planted on Ed’s back, and now he’s _grinning_.  The fucking cheater.  “…is a very valid point.”

Ed snuggles up with the pillow and lets his eyes fall shut again.  “Yeah.  So do your worst.”

Evidently, Roy’s worst involves quite a bit of open-mouthed kissing of one’s fucking vertebrae, an immense amount of almost-too-painful pressure on all of the muscles in Ed’s neck and shoulders that have knotted up the tightest, and an absolutely fucking divine bit of kneading at the scar tissue around the automail after Roy’s dipped his knuckles into some kind of oil.

There have really only been a couple of one- and two-minute stretches where Ed confidently believed that today was actually happening, but this basically seals the deal: it’s not.  He’s dreaming.  It’s pretty fucking great.

And if this is a dream, then… well, fuck it.  Ed doesn’t have to worry about thinking cold-shower thoughts while Roy digs one gorgeous elbow into a tight mass of pure misery lodged underneath his left shoulder-blade; he can just let out the tragically serious fucking moan that’s been stirring in the base of his throat since the start of this.  And he can sort of shift his hips to try to get some friction on the mattress against the increasingly insistent gathering of blood throbbing in his groin; he doesn’t have to be fucking embarrassed about rutting on Roy Mustang’s bed like some kind of horny kid if this is a _dream_ , after all.  If this is anything like the damning predecessors who have ravaged his subconscious, Roy’ll probably grab a fistful of his hair and lean in to nibble on his ear and ask him if he likes that or some shit.  The dialogue in Ed’s dreams isn’t what anybody would call exemplary, but since they’re mostly about the action anyway, he doesn’t figure it matters too mu…

Or, apparently, Roy will go very, very still, and the dangerous heat of his hands will withdraw from where it’s been spreading lines of twining fire over Ed’s vulnerable skin.

“Ah,” Roy says—very, very fucking softly; with a note that is very, very fucking rough.  Ed’s scalp tingles.

He may have miscalculated about the dream thing.  Too fucking late to fix it, though; he’s just going to have to ride this one out.

…that was a poor choice of words.  This is why he can’t do fucking dream dialogue.

Roy’s weight settles further back—directly on top of his ass, _actually_ ; and based on the way Roy hitches his body so that Ed can feel the hard heat between _Roy’s_ fucking legs right against his tailbone—

Oh, fuck.  Fuck, and _hallelujah_.

One of Roy’s hands skims up his side, fingertips slowing to trace along the dips between each of his ribs, and then skates back down to start massaging—much slower; with less efficacy and a whole lot more _meaning_ —at his hip.

“Would you like me to help you with that?” Roy asks in a whisper so soft and so fucking sultry that every single word sounds like a different kind of sin.

“Shit,” Ed says, which is much less sexy altogether.  His breath keeps catching with an edge of a tormented gasp, though, which might save it a little.  “I, uh—I—what’d—you have in mind?”

Are you not supposed to ask?  Maybe that was a faux pas—or a fuck pas, as the case may be.  Are you just supposed to—go with it?  Act by instinct?  Is talking about the thing you’re doing so off-limits that it’ll stop the doing of the thing before the thing-doing even starts?

“Let me show you,” Roy says before Ed can panic too much more—that sure doesn’t sound like someone who wants to bail; maybe he’s in the clear.  Roy’s weight shifts back and lifts off of him, and then Roy’s hand curls around his hipbone and tugs gently.  “Up a little?”

Ed doesn’t really know what he’s—what _they’re_ —doing.  But he assumes Roy does.  And he assumes it’s going to be good.  And it’s really kind of refreshing to be expecting anything other than the fucking worst for once.

Also, he’s so damn turned on he can barely see.  There’s not enough blood left in the area of his brain to sustain any second thoughts, let alone to refuse instructions spoken to him this fucking sweetly; the suggestion beats in rhythm with his pulse, coursing through him, trembling out to every last extremity.

This is what people are talking about—isn’t it?  This is why people make it such a big fucking deal.

Sex, that is.  And soulmates.  Either or both.

He pushes himself up onto his hands and knees—the mattress dimples under his palms; the right one dents it differently; the resistance of the metal changes its impression.  Even as he tries to stabilize his uneven weight, Roy’s body conforms against his—chest to his back, limbs not so much caging him as… framing?  He doesn’t fucking know; he just knows he should feel trapped, but he doesn’t, and that’s…

“Beautiful,” Roy breathes into his ear, and the shiver starts low between his hips and ripples out to the rest of him, and the roll of it along his spine pushes him up harder against Roy.

“Such a fuckin’ flatterer,” he gasps out with the failing remnants of his breath.

“Just the truth,” Roy says.

Ed would protest more—it’s sort of mandatory; it’s just how he operates—but Roy’s right arm curls around him, and then Roy’s hand sweeps low across his stomach, and then his pelvis, and then—

Anticipation smolders.

Contact _ignites_.

Perhaps _the Flame_ is more accurate than any of Roy’s other various and sundry fucking titles; perhaps, at his core, he is pure fucking heat—cataclysmic and consumptive and purifying; breathless fury incarnate, but so, _so_ warm—

And he’s in Ed’s blood and under Ed’s skin—he’s been under Ed’s skin since the beginning, hasn’t he?  And that part of the skin’s gone, but the meaning of it lingers, and the fire has a life of its own.

“Is that all right?” Roy asks, and Ed has the urge to say _Gee, lemme think; Roy Mustang, noted sex god, is palming my dick and scraping his teeth dangerously close to my vitals, and I think I’m actually dying of arousal. Eh, I guess I’ll survive_.

Too many words, though.  Too many words to fit in around the fringes of the conflagration rising in the core of him, in the middle of his body, upward and outward from where Roy’s hand rests against him, spreading fast.

So instead he just says, “Yeah.  _Yes_.  Fucking—more, Mustang, _c’mon_ —”

Which is, apparently, exactly what he should’ve said.

Evidently there’s a first time for everything.

Roy shudders against him hard enough that the motion of it passes through them both, and that is—bizarrely hot; bizarrely _close_ ; skin-to-skin and sharing nerve reactions is a kind of human synergy Ed never really thought about before, and…

And he likes it.

He wants it.

No two ways about it anymore; he wants _this_ , more than he ever fucking thought he would when he conjured the abstraction.  This is more than he imagined; deeper than he dreamed—it’s a slavering hunger and a fevered desperation and a quaking coldness slowly melting underneath the heat, and it’s just so fucking _good_ —

“At your service,” Roy says, and then his hand starts working at the fly of… whoever’s pants they are that Ed’s wearing right now, and the play of his fingertips against Ed’s dick—

Ed can’t believe his elbow joints are holding; he would’ve expected himself to be faceplanting on the mattress pretty much instantaneously after an endorphin-hormone rush like the one he just got—and is still getting; it’s like poison; he’s _possessed_ —but somehow he doesn’t just drop to the bed.  He lets his head fall, though, and his hair swings with it, and Roy’s breath sticks, and that’s a whole brand new kind of fucking power he’s never had or tried to use before.

Later, though.  When he’s not quite so fucking invested on having Roy Mustang get him off as soon as fucking possible.

Fortunately, they seem to be of the same mind as far as that goes; Roy, whose hand may or may not be entirely steady right now, drags the zipper out of the way and then grabs a firm fistful of both layers of fabric standing between his skin and Ed’s and pulls them down together.

The air’s cool for a split-second, and then Roy’s staggeringly warm hand wraps itself around Ed’s dick and starts stroking.

Oh… hell.

Or the opposite, really.

Ed’s never been much of a masturbator, which has more to do with not having a whole lot of spare time than anything else—and with being either dead fucking tired or having a book in mind when time does crop up.  He also usually gets a grand total of about forty-five seconds of hot water in the shower by the time Al is done preening and conditioning and exfoliating and whatever other foreign verbs keep his newly-recovered skin and hair as respectively supple and fluffy as they are.  It’s not like Ed hasn’t done it _occasionally_ , firstly because science; and secondly because of occasional trains of thought that meander far enough from basic science to reach anatomy, at which point they stumble towards wondering about the curious cocktail of chemicals and emotions that carnal behavior is supposed to induce.  It is and has been— _occasionally_ —practical to practice.

But none of that was anything like this.

Is it just the unexpectedness?  Is it just the fact that he can’t dictate the sensations?  Just the way his body registers that Roy’s hand isn’t remotely the same as his own, and its actions aren’t predictable?

Or is it more to do with the fact that it _is_ Roy, specifically and undeniably?

It’s _Roy_ tunneling that perfect fucking hand around his dick, fingers cradling him loosely for the first few strokes—and then curling tighter, and tighter than that, until the breath Ed’s unwittingly been holding chokes out of him in an involuntary gasp.

It’s _Roy_ smearing hot, wet, hungry kisses down along the edges of the automail, right where the scar tissue melds with unmarred skin, and groaning softly like he’s the one getting fucking pleasured.

It’s _Roy_ shifting back up to whisper “Sometimes you’re so beautiful I can’t _stand_ it” into his hair like the bastard believes every last damn word.

“Y’ever—” Ed has to drag in another breath before he can muster enough oxygen to formulate any more syllables; the fucking _fire_ in his veins just devours all the air— “You ever tried—sitting down?”

Even stupid-ass humor is pretty impressive in this situation.  Or he likes to think so, anyway.

“Mm,” Roy murmurs, mouth moving along Ed’s spine again, featuring an even more liberal application of the delicate tip of his tongue on the upward sweep.  “Considered it.  As alternatives to standing go, however, I think I like this better.”

He pumps his hand _slow_ down to the fucking base of Ed’s dick, grip almost too-tight, but his palm’s just soft enough that it feels like purgatory and a kiss.

“Me, too,” Ed chokes out.

Roy’s mouth has traveled all the way up his back again, and this time it fixes onto the side of his neck, sucking gently.  That—prickles in a way not quite like pain; Ed’s body’s so flooded with endorphins now that he can’t even distinguish between different nerve signals anymore.  Pain doesn’t exist.  It’s all just— _feelings_ ; it’s all just _good_ —

And Roy’s still stroking him, firmly and smoothly and progressively faster, but the speed increase is so fucking incremental Ed’s not sure his heart can handle the suspense.

He fights another breath in, squeezing his eyes shut, and tries to focus in on the tumultuous hurricane of rippling emotion and the rising tension clutching his guts, tightening his skin, swirling in his brain so dizzyingly it’s difficult to think concretely of anything at all—

Can friction alone fucking kill you?  It sure feels like it; it sure feels like if he tries to hold his breath and contain this, it’ll explode him from within—

“Stay with me,” Roy murmurs—against his fucking _jugular_ , and how can that be hot?  How can that particular manifestation of manageable vulnerability make him feel simultaneously wracked by the thrills rolling through him and so fucking safe?  Roy’s grasp loosens; he dapples his fingertips up, agonizingly lightly, and then down again, and then cups Ed’s balls in his hand for a brain-sparking half a second, then plunges his half-curled fingers lower to stroke the terrible-wonderful pad of his index finger back along the delicate and all-too-fucking-sensitive skin behind them—

Ed’s voice drowned in the urgent ferocity of the current of his blood what feels like a long damn time ago, or he’d say something clever. Something like _Do I have a fucking choice?_ , something like _Isn’t that the point?_ , something like _Mustang, don’t you know how fucking overwhelming everything about you is?_

He forces out a fragment of “ _Fuck_ ,” which is more than he expected to be capable of.

“That is the general concept,” Roy says.  The fucking bastard.

Ed sucks in the deepest breath he can manage with Roy’s fingers flirting with the deepest, most sensitive, most secret spaces on him: “Quit fuckin’ teasing.”

Roy’s laugh just beside his ear is low and rich and so full-throated that Ed arches involuntarily, and the lightning when their bodies collide even harder nearly short-circuits his brain.  “What’s the magic word?”

“ _Motherfucker_ ,” Ed grinds out.

This laugh is even better—lighter, sweeter, and more genuine.  Less velvet now than—chocolate.  Fucking delectable.

“Close enough,” Roy says.

His glorious hand makes a triumphant return to Ed’s throbbing, needy fucking cock—stroking hard and fast and tight and _intently_ , like this is the only fucking thing in the world he’s ever wanted; the only thing he’s ever wanted to _do_ —

And right now, Roy’s the only thing Ed wants to do, so that’s just about equivalent, isn’t it?

Fucking universes coalesce and scatter in the center of his chest—galaxies roiling in the pit of his stomach; there’s no heat quite like concentrated starlight, nothing like the fire of fusion; nothing nearly as indescribably hot and enticing, except the increasingly frantic tempo of Roy’s hand on him—the silky skin of Roy’s palm stoking a supernova in the very fucking core of him—

“Your—” He can’t breathe; can’t see; all he has is instincts, and his have always been shit.  “Your sheets—”

“To hell with my sheets,” Roy says.

Ed was planning to sleep on those fucking things; he doesn’t want to spray sticky fucking… but he’s panting too hard to say it, and even if he wasn’t, it’s _stupid_ —

“They’re—nice,” he says.

“Ah,” Roy says.

Does a fucking psychic connection come with the whole soulmate thing?  Al’s going to be so fucking jealous; up ’til now, no one else on the planet has had the slightest hope of reading Ed’s miserable tornado of a mind.

“In the interest of preserving the sheets,” Roy says, “there’s a very simple solution.  Trust me?”

“Fuck you,” Ed chokes out.  “You know I do.”

Roy presses a long, long, significant fucking kiss to the soft spot right underneath his ear, and then the beautiful-torturous hand releases his dick and wraps around his waist instead—

In order to flip him onto his back so swiftly that his lungs produce a gasp too faint to be audible by the time it pops out of his throat.

And he is all the more fucking vulnerable now—all the more open, all the more bare—and Roy’s kneeling over him, and for a soul-wrenching second, Ed’s heart bottoms out with this absolute _certainty_ that when he meets Roy’s eyes, he’ll find judgment.

He looks anyway.

And his heart jams up his throat with the vapor trail of the last aborted breath, because—

It’s nothing but fucking—

Love.

Nothing but worship; nothing but adoration and utter, unmistakable acceptance.

And that’s what this is about, isn’t it?

That’s what everyone is looking for.

And he can’t help it, can’t control it, can’t stop his left hand from reaching up and grabbing a fistful of Roy’s hair and pulling him down to kiss him, and kiss him, and then pause for breath and for Ed to lift his hips up against Roy’s and grind their bodies together much less gently.

“Thank you for the reminder,” Roy says, partly _into_ his mouth, but fortunately it’s still mostly comprehensible.  “I was distracted.”

Before Ed can assemble enough portions of a lungful of air to put any volume behind a question, Roy’s shifting back, and down, and settling his hands on Ed’s hips, and—

Sealing his gorgeous mouth around Ed’s dick and swallowing him all the way fucking down.

This cannot possibly be real.

This cannot possibly be happening; today cannot possibly be anything other than one improbably long, excruciatingly vivid fever dream—

And Ed was already pretty fucking close to the edge, but Roy’s tongue dragging up the underside of his dick is a hell of a lot more than just about _anybody_ could take, and the precipice crumbles beneath his weight—

Roy’s head dips down; he tilts it just enough to make his hair brush across Ed’s skin, and then he glances up—mouth around Ed’s dick, eyes dark and hooded and blazingly intent, and—

Ed’s hips jolt, and his back arches, and a noise that’s half protest and half sheer pleasure escapes him, and he—

Lets go.

And the blinding, buzzing white envelops him, then shatters into a prismatic spread of colors too numerous to name.

He surfaces gasping for air again, trying to blink enough to clear the lingering spots of spectral afterimage from his eyes.  By the time he succeeds, Roy’s crawled up the bed and settled in beside him, right arm draped across his chest.

“Satisfactory?” he asks.

Ed stares, clears his throat, clears it again, and croaks out, “The fuck is wrong with you?”

Roy laughs.  “I expected you to have a list.”

“I do,” Ed says.  “Fuckin’ alphabetized and color-coded with bookmarks and shit.  Now I gotta catalogue this, too.”

Roy nestles in closer and kisses Ed’s cheek.  Which is disgusting.  “Other than the impending additions to the long list of my grievous flaws—you’re all right?”

“Well, gee,” Ed says.  He has to content himself with wrinkling his nose a lot, because it’d be rude to wriggle away from the affectionate-snuggle thing Roy’s doing.  Really rude.  It’s not that he’s not enjoying it in the slightest; it’s just that he doesn’t want to be an asshole about it.  “The individual widely-acknowledged as the hottest fucking guy in Central just blew me, and apparently we’re soulmates.  I guess shit’s okay.”

Roy laughs again, softly, and the way his eyes gleam with it should be a fucking crime.  “Only Central?  I was really hoping for the entirety of Amestris.  At _least_ Central and the majority of the east.  A regional accolade.”

“You’re gonna have to blow me a couple more times for that,” Ed says.

This gleam’s completely different.

“I look forward to it,” Roy says.

“You would,” Ed says.

They look at each other as a couple of long, long seconds trickle by.

“In all seriousness,” Roy says, which is an ominous start to any sentence, but especially one delivered while Ed’s lying in his destiny-boyfriend’s bed with his borrowed pair of pants down, “this is all… a bit unexpected.  Are you…?”

“I eat universe-twisting alterations to the status quo for breakfast,” Ed says.  “Remember?”

“Historically,” Roy says, “yes.  But historical precedent doesn’t guarantee that any individual instance can’t be… troublesome.”

“You’re troublesome,” Ed says.  “Or just trouble, I guess.  But I’m used to it by now.  And it’s the kind of trouble that I like.”

Again with the damn illegality—that grin’s got to be banned in every civilized country in the world, except apparently for the one that they inhabit.  Maybe Ed should move.

“You,” Roy says, “are my absolute favorite kind of trouble.”

“Cute,” Ed says.

Roy gives him a cheesy wink.  The _fucker_.  “That’s what I was going for.”

Ed wrinkles his nose a little harder.  “Well, you’re right on the fucking mark.”

Roy pauses.

Ed raises an eyebrow.

Roy grins a little wider.

“Excellent,” he says.

And if his arm tightens just a bit, enough that Ed swears he can almost feel the beat of the bastard’s pulse against his skin—enough that Ed swears he can almost feel a patch of skin in a geometric shape warming just slightly against him—

Well.  It’s been a hell of a day.  No harm staying here a little while.

  


* * *

  


Ed registers, first and foremost, that it’s really fucking warm in his bed—so damn cozy it feels like he’s getting away with something, or getting something for free; and probably that should be a red flag, but for the moment, he’s just going to snuggle a little closer with the comforter.

He’s not about to admit it unless there’s some duress involved, but there’s a remote possibility that he’s a pretty vigorous comforter-snuggler.  There’s a remote and related possibility that that’s why he wriggles enough settling in with it that he collides with a warm limb.

Damn it.  That startles him awake in a second, and the instant adrenaline rush buoys his heart right up into his throat, and—

And Roy Mustang, eyes all sleep-hazy, hair all mussed, cheek squished against the other pillow, looks at him and… smiles.

“Good morning,” he says.

Ed stares at him.  And then, in typical fucking Edward Elric fashion, Ed says the first thing his jumbled brain comes out with:

“I’m still wearing your pants.”

The smile splits into a grin.  “That you are.”

Ed blinks.  He’s so out of his fucking depth here that it feels like he’s treading water with everything he’s got and just barely keeping his nose above the surface.  “So… what… happens now?”

Roy shifts—slowly, cautiously, no sudden movements—and reaches out to brush Ed’s hair back from his face.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he says.  “Would you like to find out?”

People are always parroting that stupid pseudo-optimistic bullshit platitude— _Today’s the first day of the rest of your life!_

But this time, it feels fucking true.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and he finds himself smiling back at stupid-ass, gorgeous Roy while he says it.  “Yeah, all right.”

“Wonderful,” Roy says, and Ed can feel that he means it.


End file.
